Ioffe, Yulia; Viterbo, Hedi; (2024) No Refuge from Childhood: How Child Protection Harms Refugees. European Journal of International Law , 35 (3) pp. 647-678. 10.1093/ejil/chae055.

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Abstract

This article sheds new and critical light on the notion, enshrined in international law, that child refugees are a uniquely vulnerable and dependent age group requiring special protection. Although protection is not inherently detrimental, this conception of child protection often ends up harming refugees of all ages. It casts adult refugees as less vulnerable, less dependent and less deserving of protection than their younger counterparts. It downplays the contextual, relational and socially constructed nature of vulnerability, dependence and childhood. It potentially contributes to the disregard for the capacity and wishes of child refugees. It usually affords these children only temporary protection, thereby increasing their uncertainty, driving them to disengage from welfare services and incentivizing the state to delay decisions about their entitlements. Meanwhile, international law not only places great value on children’s relationships with their parents but also authorizes the punishment of supposedly unfit parents, and this ambivalence helps states weaponize legal principles of child protection against refugee families. What is needed, however, is not for child refugees to be denied protection. Rather, a fundamental reimagining of protection is in order: a shift from hierarchies of vulnerability, dependence and deservingness towards free global movement based on solidarity and equity.

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