Editors:  Rebecca Adami, Anna Kaldal , and  Margareta As

How can human rights for children born outside their national jurisdiction with parents deemed as terrorists be safeguarded? In what ways do children risk being discriminated in their welfare rights in Sweden when treated as invisible part of a family? How can we do research on children’s rights in not just ethically sensitive ways but also with respect for children as rights subjects? And what could be a theory on social justice for children? These are questions discussed in studies from different disciplines concerning children’s international human rights, with a special focus on the realization of the CRC in Sweden.

Leiden: Brill, 2023. 

By Emily Ryo and Reed Humphrey

Every year, tens of thousands of migrant children are taken into custody by U.S. immigration authorities. Many of these children are unaccompanied by parents or relatives when they arrive at the U.S. border. Others who are accompanied by parents or relatives are rendered unaccompanied when U.S. immigration authorities separate them upon apprehension. Together, these minors are called unaccompanied alien children (UACs) and transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), unless and until their immigration cases are resolved or until the children can be placed with a sponsor in the United States pending the adjudication of their immigration cases. In fiscal year 2019, the ORR held the highest number of UACs in its UAC program history. This study presents the first systematic empirical investigation of children in ORR custody using original administrative records pertaining to migrant children who were in ORR custody between November 2017 and August 2019. Our analysis reveals an increasing number and proportion of children in U.S. custody who are extremely vulnerable: girls, young children of tender age (260 of whom are U.S. citizens), and children emigrating from countries with high rates of crime and violence. This trend suggests that insofar as punitive immigration enforcement policies may have deterred some children from undertaking the dangerous journey to the United States, those who continue to arrive at the U.S. border are likely children who are most in need of special care and legal protection. Yet our analysis raises serious questions about the system’s capacity to afford such care and protection. We find that most migrant children held in custody were concentrated in a small number of states, which are different from the states in which their sponsors reside. Only about 11 percent of children reunified were discharged from facilities located in the same state as their sponsors’ states of residence. In addition, most migrant children were in facilities that are extremely large—for example, shelters with capacities of 100 or more children. We also find deep inequalities in the system that suggest that custodial experiences and outcomes of UACs in ORR custody are closely tied to the particular facility and type of program in which a child happens to be placed. Among other findings, our analysis shows that the median time to reunification varies widely between facilities. For example, one ORR shelter’s median time to reunification was nearly eight times as high as that of another ORR shelter. We discuss the policy implications of these findings and consider critical issues that require further investigation—issues that are central to evaluating how, whether, and to what extent the U.S. government is fulfilling its moral and legal obligation to protect migrant children inside our borders.

UCLA Law Review, 2021. 75p.

By Wendy S. Hesfor.

Violent Exceptions turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children’s human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional—erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2021. 282p.

By African Child Policy Forum.

This publication is prepared both to advance our knowledge of the important but complex subject of child Justice in Africa and to inform the discussions at the 2nd Global Conference on Child Justice in Africa to be held in Addis Ababa in May 2018. This conference, organised by the African Child Policy forum (ACPF) and Defence for Children International (DCI) is a follow-up to the first such conference that took place in Kampala, Uganda, in November 2011. That conference resulted in the African Guidelines on Action for Children in Justice Systems in Africa which were endorsed by the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child at its March 2012 meeting. ACPF also published a continental study on children and justice systems in that year. The current study updates and extends that earlier study, seeking to examine the progress that has been made, and the challenges that remain, since the 2011 conference in achieving childfriendly justice in African justice systems. Given that children come in contact with justice system in different ways – through the formal and informal justice systems, in religious justice systems in some parts of the continent, and in both the criminal and civil justice systems – this study charts the continuum of experiences that children undergo in their contact with these systems.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia" ACPF, 2018. 173p.