This analysis is very much an exploratory exercise, one that aims to be more suggestive than conclusive. It draws on 27 semi-structured interviews with CCT recipients, mostly female but a few male, conducted in three urban locations within Greater Buenos Aires in the years 2006–7. At the time of the interviews, the informants were recipients of the first two CCT programmes in Argentina, the Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar Desocupados and, in a few instances, the Plan Familias (described below). The interviews were conducted in six workfare locations, including childcare centres, NGOs, schools and churches.

The data has some notable weaknesses. Besides the modest sample size, the interviews were conducted for other purposes, namely, in conjunction with studies evaluating the impact of the cash transfers and the value of the educational workshops for recipients. Therefore, they did not deliberately or consistently address the themes discussed here. Discussions of childcare strategies, for example, emerged only fortuitously. The fairly long interviews (each about an hour in length) tended to develop somewhat organically and did not always cover the same ground. Moreover, they provide much more insight into women's perceptions of the workfare programs and considerably less about their uses of the cash transfers. Our analysis therefore focuses on workfare, although in the conclusion we review the limited data concerning income and find similar dynamics of meaning-making. An additional concern is the extent to which the nature and purpose of the interviews influenced the women's remarks. Informants may not have felt fully comfortable articulating critiques of social programs of which they were recipients. Moreover, given the extensive presence of child protection authorities in these communities, they may have been careful to talk about their children and childrearing in ways that conformed to the norms propounded by these authorities. Finally, these sources do not allow us to access children's perceptions and perspectives on their practices at all.

Despite these drawbacks, the interviews evinced certain patterns that we believe are worth highlighting, not least because they seemed to complicate some conventional wisdom concerning the CCTs' impact on recipients. Indeed, the recurrence of certain themes in interviews designed for quite different purposes is itself potentially revelatory.

The dynamics we highlight concerning the relationship between women, children and social policy emerge out of a very specific social context, namely the poor, peripheral barrios of greater metropolitan Buenos Aires at the dawn of the twenty-first century. We make no claim for the universality of these dynamics. What we *are* making a claim for is the importance, in assessing the relationship between feminism and the politics of childhood, of attending to local processes of meaning-making and the ways that the immediate material, political and ideological context shapes these processes.

# A brief overview of Conditional Cash Transfer programmes in Argentina

In Argentina, the first conditional cash transfer programme was the Plan Jefes y Jefas de Hogar Desocupados (PJJHD), or Programme for Unemployed Male and Female Household Heads. Initiated in 2002 in the wake of the dire political, financial and economic crisis in which the government resigned and half of the population sank into poverty, the programme targeted unemployed heads of households. The PJJHD differed from similar CCT programs in Brazil and Mexico in that it benefited unemployed household heads regardless of sex. Still, approximately 70 per cent of the recipients were women. In exchange for the cash transfer (a monthly payment of Argentinian \$150 (US \$75)), recipients were required to perform 20 hours of community work per week or to participate in educational workshops. They also received economic support in order to finish elementary school. The programme reached an estimated 1.5 to 1.8 million recipients by 2003.

In 2005/6, the PJJHD was replaced by the Seguro de Desempleo y Formación, or Unemployment Insurance, and Plan Familias (PF). This new programme organised recipients according to a highly gendered criterion: those deemed able to work (in practice, mainly men) were given unemployment stipends and reorganised in cooperative work projects, whereas those deemed unemployable (typically women with dependent children) received the PF, which provided mothers with cash transfers dependent on family size. The programme thus incentivised economic inactivity among women, thereby re-inscribing the distinction between male worker and female housewife. In addition, the PF redefined the central problem requiring intervention. Whereas the PJJH had identified the problem as unemployment, the PF defined it as the poverty of femaleheaded households. Accordingly, the *contraprestación*, which had previously centred on employment training and female community work, now came to focus on the human development of children. In particular, recipients were required to ensure children's school attendance and health visits as a condition of their benefits. The programme also incorporated workshops for mothers on themes related to childcare (nutrition, early childhood development, adolescent challenges, etc.), sexual health and domestic and gender violence. The programme came to cover some two million children before being phased out in 2009,10 when it was replaced by another CCT programme.

### Profile of the recipients: the heterogeneities of poverty

According to data culled from programme evaluations, 57 per cent of PJJH recipients had received only an elementary education (and 20 per cent of those had never completed primary school), 68 per cent had worked in low- or no-skill jobs, and almost a quarter of the women had no work experience outside the home at all. The majority of those with labour experience had worked in domestic service; work in industrial or administrative jobs was also (though to a lesser extent) common.11 While receiving the PJJH benefits, about a third of women were involved in informal economic activities or petty commerce, including clothing and shoe repair and scavenging for bottles and recyclable cardboard (*cartoneo*), in addition to domestic service.12 Almost half of the women considered themselves to be 'housewives' (rather than 'heads of household'), meaning the principal household income came from their male partners and the women themselves had not worked in income-generating employment prior to receiving the transfers. In general, the women who had never participated in the labour market were younger and had younger children than women with prior labour market experience.13

In terms of educational attainment and labour experience, the recipients in our sample were broadly representative of the general population of CCT recipients: they had little schooling and those who had worked outside the home had primarily done so in domestic service. Yet a generic characterisation of the recipients as poor, uneducated or unskilled tends to obscure certain heterogeneities among them. Specifically, it is possible to distinguish two distinct subsets of households in somewhat different conditions, one more self-sufficient (accounting for roughly three quarters of the women), the other much more vulnerable (about one quarter of the group). The first group consists of those households with ties to the labour market and with more than one member of the household producing income. The second, more vulnerable group had larger numbers of dependent members and little participation in the formal labour market. For them, the financial assistance of the cash transfers constituted the only stable income the households received, although they were living in a monetised economy. The distinction between the two groups rests less on absolute material conditions and more on their distinct social and occupational genealogies, which result in different strategies of household reproduction. As we will see, these differences shape the CCTs and the meanings assigned to them.

The first group was composed of women who tended to self-identify as 'wives' (*esposas*) or 'homemakers' (*amas de casa*). The 'homemakers' were mainly co-resident with male partners, and their strategies of income generation were based primarily on domestic tasks in their own homes or, sporadically, in the homes of others (including sewing, preparing and selling food, etc.), but some of these women had previous experience in industries or the public sector in low-skill jobs. The children of these women participated in household reproductive activities only within their own homes (assisting with cooking and cleaning, caring for siblings, etc.) and contributed their own income to the household only at a much later age.

The second, more vulnerable group was comprised of women on their own with several children, with employment histories linked exclusively to informal and unstable work as domestic help or in scavenging. Many of them were internal migrants; their social networks were restricted, and their formal schooling was even more limited than the general beneficiary population (indeed, some of the women were illiterate). Such women mobilised all of their children in strategies of household survival.

Beyond these broad sociological profiles, myriad emic hierarchies marked the micro-politics of barrio life. Women residents constructed social gradations based on a series of attributes including age, sexual behaviour, maternal practices, domesticity and status as an established resident or a newcomer.

# Stratified maternity in barrio life

The heterogeneities of poor women are reflected in distinct practices of maternal carework. Indeed, maternity itself is a criterion of social and moral hierarchy: some mothering behaviours are valorised while others are condemned. Not surprisingly, such judgments issue from the higherstatus group, but significantly, they also take the form of self-evaluations on the part of the more vulnerable women. As we will see, the income from the CCTs as well as the *contraprestaciones* are grafted onto these distinctions. The new resources and responsibilities associated with the programmes do not create these hierarchies of maternity, but they do seem to reiterate and perhaps reinscribe them.14

Women in the barrio organise carework according to distinct criteria and with distinct goals in mind, according to the resources at their disposal and their strategies of household reproduction. Those with greater resources (educational, social and material) tend to organise care around a central guiding preoccupation: to guarantee the best education possible to their children, and more social capital. For example, these women may send children to more distant or less accessible schools (as does Andrea, who pays for a cab every day to send her three children to a faraway school) under the premise that this will permit the children 'to mix with another kind of people'. In other instances, it may involve paying for private or semi-private schools. This is the case for Mirta and Cristina, who send their children to private schools to ensure educational quality and requisite number of instructional days. As Cristina says: 'here in the barrio many things are missing and if you want children to have all the days of instruction that they need, you have to send them to a private school.'

Meanwhile, more vulnerable women have few opportunities for improving their children's educational opportunities. In these households, children are less subjects of improvement projects than crucial contributors to household survival.15 As noted above, more vulnerable women must depend on the labour of their children both domestically and in income-generating activities. A migrant of a remote northwest town, Blanca relied on her seven children to assist with scavenging and household labour. Likewise, Nelly, a mother of nine from a small rural town, residing in the home of an uncle, derived her income from scavenging and begging. She would send her oldest son to collect cardboard in the city centre while she stayed in their peripheral neighbourhood with the younger ones.

The women engaged in these activities subtly defended such choices. Nelly asserted that when she brought her children to scavenge for cardboard, she did so because she had nowhere else to leave them: 'I went with the children. Before there was no day care, [where] one can leave the children and go *cartonear* knowing that they are taken care of. We had to bring them with us or leave them at home alone. I brought them with me ...It was safer.' In other words, bringing children along reflected not exploitation of their labour or disregard for their well-being, but an expression of maternal responsibility.

Meanwhile, among better-off women, none of the children provided extra income, either as a matter of course or even when the family landed on hard times, although they did perform household tasks. They criticised the strategies of mothers who scavenged for cardboard or participated in street mobilisations (the latter a 'remunerated' activity insofar as protesters sometimes receive gifts or remuneration for their participation) as morally and materially inferior care. Carina notes the risks that children confront when taking part in protests and opines that mothers take advantage of their offspring when they bring them to such events to earn extra money. Andrea, who has observed cardboard scavengers with youngsters in tow late at night out in the streets, asks: 'why do they do that to their children?'

The critique seems to centre on what they perceive as other mothers' instrumental use of their children. In this way, the different roles of children, and associated maternal practices, become a criterion of moral differentiation. As Delia says, there are bad mothers who do not take care of their children; 'being poor is not an excuse'. Better-off women position themselves as devoted mothers and assimilate notions of progress and sacrifice. They may feel they are accountable to middle-class norms of austerity and economic prudence in their approach to material wellbeing and education, even though they do not have the flexibility (material and social) to perform it.16

Such condemnations are issued not only by better-off women but also, significantly, by more vulnerable ones as a form of self-critique. Unable to mobilise an educational project on behalf of their children, these women in a sense see *themselves* as the ones in need of educational intervention. They articulate their own perceived maternal incompetence, as did the cardboard scavenger Nelly, who suggested she required help from the coordinator of the *contraprestación* to stop being 'ignorant'. Such self-critiques were expressed in the course of conversations about the *contraprestaciones*, which publicly showcase relative maternal competency by controlling and critiquing those women considered negligent mothers. It is possible the women experience heightened feelings of incompetence as a result of their incorporation into these new spaces of visibility, or perhaps this is a strategic performance on the part of recipients who believe the coordinators of these programs expect such a response. Whatever the reason, as we will see below, the *contraprestaciones* are a new terrain on which maternal stratification plays out.

Ultimately, then, the care of children grants differential moral value to women. The idea of 'taking good care of them' (*tenerlos bien atendidos*) permits women to draw a frontier that they use to establish superiority over others and to mobilise these moral valorisations in the competition for affective and material resources17 as well as social ones. Women's notion of 'taking good care of them' clearly reflects middle-class cultural repertoires concerning children's care, education and the organisation of domesticity that, in one form or another, have been impressed upon poor women for more than a century.18 It is noteworthy, however, that while such ideals are disseminated vertically (by agents of the state or other authorities), women express and experience them horizontally, as they compare or are compared to 'other mothers'. Moreover, the meanings of care go beyond its status as unpaid, secondary or contingent labour.

#### Enter the CCTs: *contraprestaciones* and cash

It is on this social terrain, in which maternal practice is a criterion of moral differentiation, that the CCTs are grafted. For women themselves, these new resources and responsibilities acquired meanings that were not just material but also social and moral. But given the stratified nature of maternity in the barrio, not all women experienced them in the same way. Employment histories, strategies of household sustenance, as well as specific characteristics of the community and neighbourhood shaped their experiences and attitudes towards the *contraprestación*. Meanwhile, their experiences and attitudes did not necessarily square with gendered critiques of the CCTs.

The PJJH provided monthly cash payments in exchange for workfare consisting of 20 hours of weekly labour. Often the work involved service in community childcare centres or soup kitchens as well as in community gardens, street cleaning or other tasks – labours which several women explicitly characterised as 'men's work'. While critics have observed how workfare reinforces gender stereotypes in work assignments, women tended simply to comment on instances in which they were given tasks they considered 'men's work': a fact some found curious or noteworthy, and others disliked.

Another critique is that workfare represents an undue burden on already struggling poor people and is a source of cheap labour for the state. Again, women's experiences did not quite square with this assessment. For many of the 'housewives', the PJJH *contraprestaciones* constituted the first time they had systematically left the home to work and generated the first stable income of their own. Rather than resent these obligations as an additional burden on their time, they tended to talk about why they were preferable to the alternative of paid employment. Specifically, the programmes permitted them to reconcile work outside the household with the care of their children and in this sense gave them a (minimal) margin of choice in terms of the conditions they could demand of employment 'outside the *barrio*'. In this sense, while *contraprestaciones* may well have been an additional burden, women understood them as a favourable alternative to other, even less desirable forms of remunerated work.

Miriam, for example, had always been a housewife. When her husband no longer earned sufficient income from his appliance repair shop, she entered the PJJH. In this context, she considered the *contraprestación* her best option because it was compatible with what she considered to be her primary labour, namely caring for her six children. The *contraprestación* was located in her neighbourhood, which saved her the time and expense of reaching a more distant job; it allowed for flexibility in terms of adapting to her carework; it permitted her to share her carework with other women participants, and to use the resources (food, clothing, etc.) of the social service organisation where she worked. Meanwhile, for many women, the costs – symbolic, social and material – of working in informal jobs and leaving children in the care of elder siblings (usually girls) were higher than accepting the conditionalities associated with the cash transfers.

But some women regarded *contraprestaciones* as more than simply the lesser of two possible burdens. Notably, the conditionalities themselves had certain positive associations. For one, the requirement introduced housewives, whose labours previously occurred in the isolation of their own homes, into a network of neighbourhood women. When asked on whom they relied when in need, most women said their family members, noting that their neighbours were strangers. 'Not to nose around in others' business' and 'being a woman of her house' are common ways of referring to the normative ideal that confines a woman to her own home and family relations. In this very conservative environment, women needed an 'excuse' to get out of their homes. In this context many women appreciated the opportunity afforded by the *contraprestación* for social connections for which they had previously had neither time nor opportunity. 'Women also need to get out a bit...People like to be in company', noted Monica of the isolation of working alone in one's household.

Indeed, many women talked about the *contraprestacion* as an opportunity for a certain form of gendered sociability. 'We get together to talk' was the most usual way of describing the exchanges that occurred in community centres. 'I met a lot of people...I made many girlfriends', noted Marcela of her labour cleaning streets in work gangs. Such sociability was hardly 'idle chatter' but provided women with certain resources and opportunities, psychological and economic. Imelda noted that the *contraprestación* provided the 'companionship' and mutual aid of other women that allowed her to separate from her abusive husband. In some instances, sociability became 'networking' as women parlayed new social relationships into joint economic activities. This was the case for Gladys, a widow who sold weavings made in the *contraprestaciones* in collaboration with her 'new friends'. Others invested in petty commerce (although unstable and short term) with women they had met through workfare. It is a deep irony of this consummately neoliberal contrivance that workfare was experienced by some women as an opportunity for communal exchange and social and affective solidarity.

Meanwhile, the performance of the *contraprestaciones* constituted a means by which to gain social recognition for activities that mobilised and 'improved' their skills as caretakers and mothers. Carina, mother of three, noted that what she learned helped her better care for her children, which earned her new respect from her offspring: 'we sit together and we do homework. Now I can explain to them what they do not understand.' For Nelly, the *contraprestación* 'is my second home', the place where she learned to be a more educated person. 'I changed my personality for good,' she noted.

At the same time, the intimacies and sociabilities associated with *contraprestaciones* could form the basis not just for support, solidarity or self-improvement but also for stratification and control. Recall that the self-critiques of maternal incompetence on the part of more vulnerable women were expressed in the context of *contraprestación* activities. The very act of bringing children into public workfare spaces to care for them generated critiques on the part of more 'experienced' mothers. Children's behaviour was evaluated as a function of the mother's identity, insofar as younger mothers, women on their own, and those who came from the most vulnerable households became objects of critique by others who criticised their childrearing abilities. The *contraprestación* was absorbed into the micro-hierarchies of barrio life.

In 2005/6, with the transition from the PJJH to the Plan Familias, the *contraprestación* was replaced by private carework: recipients were no longer required to work in community projects and henceforth received the cash transfer in exchange for ensuring their children's school attendance and attendance at medical check-ups. But this change, rather than being welcomed as easing their labour burden, acquired for these women a double negative valence. First, it reprivatised work after the experience of communal labour. And second, it created the moral dilemma of receiving pay for something that women considered to be their responsibility as mothers. Lidia, a separated mother of five, found the idea of being told to perform her maternal duties condescending: 'no one has to obligate me to do anything, I already know what I have to do.' In this sense, while removing the workfare requirement decreased women's work load, attending only to this consequence misses the positive valences the old labour requirements had acquired for some women, as well as the negative meanings that accrued to the new, seemingly less burdensome conditionalities.

While the foregoing discussion has focused on the CCTs' workfare conditionalities, it is worth briefly mentioning the touchstone of these programmes, namely, the cash payments themselves. While our data is limited, the evidence suggests that income use, like workfare, reflected the stratified nature of the barrio, acquiring different uses and meanings for the two groups of women. Those with greater access to social and material resources mobilised caretaking ideals as a way to establish a degree of independent license over the transfers, and sometimes even over income generated by men, because women are understood (by themselves as well as by men) as 'naturally understanding the needs of the children'. At the same time, their choices in spending the money were constrained by the dynamics discussed above, in which women judged one another for their choices.

For higher-status women, certain 'middle-class' ideals of childrearing shaped convictions about what constituted appropriate and inappropriate expenditures on children. For instance, Carina expressed the view that CCT money should be used for the goods and supplies required for children to be 'decent' at school – expenditures like shoes, snacks and school uniforms. In this view, spending the payments on superfluous material goods, such as expensive sneakers, was considered morally condemnable. This use of the money, as part of a strategy of investing in and 'improving' children, distinguished this group from the more vulnerable one. For women in a more precarious situation, meanwhile, the transfers were often the principal or even the only source of household income, and the money tended to be spent on basic consumption needs. This was the case for Estela, who worked as a domestic worker and used the money to feed the family since her husband's income from *changas* (odd jobs) did not suffice for their four children.

### Conclusion

Critiques of CCTs identify troubling patriarchal assumptions built into the structure of these programmes, and by extension into the state's relationship to poor women. As the critiques suggest, these policies contribute to gender subordination and inequality by positioning women as mothers and naturalising their work as care providers. By making mothers subordinated 'bearers of policy'19 directed at children, the CCTs both reflect and reinforce the tensions between women's rights and children's rights that the literatures on carework, reproductive labour and children's rights have brought to the fore. We accept these critiques but argue that interviews with CCT recipients from poor Argentine barrios suggest additional dynamics that these assessments do not address or account for. The dynamics we highlight are embedded in the lived experience of social programmes (as opposed to their policy design) and in the social life of maternalism (as opposed to its abstract expression).

While there are most certainly tensions in barrio households and communities, the most salient ones from the perspective of women themselves are not those between mothers and children. Maternal carework is certainly labour, but it is not just labour. Mothers do not experience it exclusively as a burden on their time and autonomy; rather, they mobilise carework for certain strategic ends in accordance with dominant maternal ideologies. Meanwhile, the interviews make clear that we cannot reduce *contraprestaciones* to labour performed or cash transfers to income received. Even when they were required to perform as many as 20 hours of community work weekly, some women – depending on their prior labour biography, household organisation, and specific aspects of the expected work – regarded workfare as a way out of hyper-exploitive informal jobs and even as a way to access social recognition.

As women incorporate these responsibilities and resources into lives situated in heterogeneous contexts of family and community, they acquire meanings and create strategic opportunities. Motherhood is a public identity as well as a familial one, with consequences outside the family as well as within it. Women mobilise motherhood to create status, form or strengthen social networks, garner recognition, and validate and consolidate (frequently conservative) approaches to women's needs and rights. If CCTs position women as mothers, women use this maternalisation instrumentally. If the policy design of the CCTs treats women as passive conduits for children's well-being, recipients themselves do not *act* simply as conduits. The material and ideological resources invested in children-as-citizens may create opportunities for their mothers.20 In strategically mobilising the state's maternalism for their own ends, barrio women may indeed forgo certain possibilities for autonomy. But they do so in the service of other goals, such as making ends meet and constructing a respectable social position.

Of course, not all women benefit, or benefit to the same degree, from these strategic mobilisations. Maternalisation creates opportunities for assigning moral worth but also for condemning moral shortcomings. For example, the way that women participate in workfare evinces implicit divisions that need to be explored further. But clearly hierarchies between women are based on a complex interplay in which age, sexual behaviour, maternal practices and domesticity come into play.

Such observations suggest the importance of attending to horizontal as well as vertical relations of power. Feminist analyses of welfare policy, including the CCTs, tend to privilege vertical interactions between women and the state. Indeed, the CCT programs are hardly the only state interlocutors with which poor barrio women interact: systems of child rights protection are also omnipresent, giving mothers access to certain institutional resources even as they expose them to additional forms of state regulation. At the same time, our evidence suggests that for recipients, the meanings of the CCTs also derive from horizontal linkages. Women's interactions with partners, children, other family members, community members, and each other ultimately shape the experiences and meanings associated with resources and responsibilities conferred by the state.

What, then, is the analytic takeaway of the preceding discussion? First, we stress what it is *not*. It is not a claim about the relationship between women's and children's interests *tout court*. We do not propose that there are no tensions between these interests, that maternalism is actually 'good', or that in point of fact CCTs are benign policies that empower their female recipients. Rather, the assessments, choices and bargains we highlight pertain to a specific group of women in a specific time and place. Ours is a local case study, and the choices these mothers make, and the meanings they assign to certain resources and responsibilities, have no necessary applicability beyond this particular setting. But embedded in this very limitation is an analytic lesson of broader scope: the lesson that context matters. Social policy in general, and statesponsored maternalism in particular, can have no meaning in abstraction from the social context in which it is applied.

In the Argentine barrios, children are not only a constraint on women's autonomy, but also a substantive resource. The opposition between the two, which recurs in feminist critiques of the CCTs, is much more a consequence of material and symbolic restrictions that reduce legitimate social roles for lower classes women to the 'good mother' than of any intrinsic opposition.21 Examining women and children's roles in their immediate social context may help us better understand the many ways in which the social construction of gender and childhood are mutually constitutive, and the ways in which, for better or for worse, the social protection of women is tied to ideologies of childhood.

From the foregoing we may also infer a political lesson. Once again, we stress what the lesson is *not*. The fact that CCT recipients in certain situations express enthusiasm for workfare or actively engage the policy's maternalist design should not be interpreted as vindication of conditional transfers or their gendered, neoliberal logic. Rather, the choices of poor Argentine mothers should be understood to reflect the formidable material constraints, ideological frameworks and disciplinary structures that circumscribe their lives, ranging from limited employment options to scarce opportunities for social recognition. Their choices thus speak not to some intrinsic merit of these programmes but to a strategic calculus based on the conditions of possibility in a manifestly unequal, patriarchal context. Gender equality and children's rights, as decontextualised and abstract discourses, may make invisible certain idiosyncratic patriarchal bargains.22 We need not accept neoliberalism's romance with self-reliance and co-responsibility to recognise how barrio women may instrumentally mobilise neoliberal maternalism to their own benefit, however limited that benefit may be.

The CCTs and the dynamics they engender reinforce the dominant ideal that treats mothers as responsible for children's well-being. And of course, assigning differential social value to women based on their maternal behaviours is deeply problematic. In these ways, the maternalisation of the CCTs reinforces patriarchy. But while CCTs maternalise welfare, the effects of these policies cannot be read as simply creating or reinforcing a tension between mothers and their children. Rather, the relationship of women's and children's interests must be evaluated on the actual social field – political, material, cultural – on which it plays out.

#### NOTES

# 13 Decolonising childrearing and challenging the patriarchal nuclear family through Indigenous knowledges *An Opokaa'sin project*

Tanya Pace-Crosschild

Indigenous peoples have a long and tumultuous history in Canada. Since first contact in the late fifteenth century, the ultimate goal of the settlercolonists was to rid themselves of the Indigenous peoples to facilitate the acquisition of resources. Violence has been, and continues to be, imposed on Indigenous peoples, families and communities through various forms of oppression and marginalisation. Settler colonialism is an ongoing reality of intersecting structures through which Indigenous peoples have been displaced from their land, cultures and each other. As Canada developed as a nation these structures of violence became internalised within Indigenous communities. Shifts began to occur within the fabric of Indigenous society, including family structures.

Family and complex kinship structures have always been at the heart of Blackfoot wellness and Blackfoot ability to function as a selfdetermining nation.1 The Euro-Western nuclear family model is in contradiction to that of Indigenous families, where women and children weren't seen as one and the same. In traditional societies, men and women held mutually respectful positions. Children played an integral role in the tribe, with extended family playing a large and crucial role in the raising of children. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and extended family surrounded the children in a network of support with responsibility shared amongst this network.

Residential schools instituted a system of forced removal of Indigenous children from their communities for colonial socialisation in church or state boarding schools. When they were introduced, the preceding Indigenous networks were disrupted. Although the stated intent of the residential schools was education, the outcome was the loss of language, culture and identity for many Indigenous people.

Recently, the numbers of Indigenous children in foster care have sky-rocketed. Decisions about children's custody are made predominantly according to the *mother's* ability to care for them. Many kinship relations have been displaced and/or disregarded as a result of colonisation. Indigenous children are frequently placed in non-Indigenous foster homes based on an erroneous set of colonial assumptions that fail to see Indigenous family and kinship models or see them as incapable of fulfilling childcare needs. The result is that thousands of Indigenous children are being raised away from their traditions, culture and community, which is a clear indication of the ongoing forms of colonisation that continue today. The current child welfare approach provides a clear example of the impact that colonialism has had on women–child relations in Indigenous communities.

One thing is clear: the history of settler colonialism is not a matter of a single event, but of a set of policies designed for assimilation. When we look to the past and examine the displacement of our traditional value systems and social structures, it is evident that the patriarchal values that were imposed on Indigenous people resulted in the imbalances we have experienced between settlers and Indigenous people and in the position of women and children. These values, perpetuated by both church and state, have further dispossessed women and children.

The process of decolonisation requires reassertion of Indigenous knowledge systems and the restoration of salient relationships within family and kinship models. In order to move towards a transformational shift in the Indigenous–settler relationship, we must engage in a framework for regenerating a vital source of strength, namely connections to culture and language. Settler colonialism is about maintaining the narrative of Indigenous inferiority and justifying continued forms of violence and dispossession. Therefore, embodying tradition through cultural practice is a central tactic for engaging in a paradigm of decolonial knowledge production and repelling the harmful narratives surrounding colonial misrepresentations.

Centring Indigenous knowledge in childhood development is the foundation of Opokaa'sin, an Indigenous child and family centre located in the heart of traditional Blackfoot territory. Situated at the base of the great Rocky Mountains of present-day western Canada, Opokaa'sin is dedicated to 'decolonising' approaches to early childhood and to strengthening cultural identity amongst Indigenous families and youth. Rebuilding Indigenous nations requires us to rebuild our childrearing practices. Prior to colonisation, many Indigenous communities viewed children as sacred beings. They were held in the highest regard because they were seen to be extremely close to the spirit world. Their location in society required the collective efforts of the community in childrearing, not just the sole responsibility of the mother. Opokaa'sin is working with families to address the insidious acts of violence that settler colonialism has placed on our family structures and childrearing practices. This is a large project as it requires decolonising our mindsets and rejecting the imposed colonial values of patriarchy, women's labour, the nuclear family and capitalist ideas about children. Through the incorporation of our traditional teachings, stories and language, we are reorienting ourselves back to our traditions.

Opokaa'sin, which means 'all our children' in Blackfoot, believes that cultural reconnection is one of the means through which true reconciliation and healing can take place. Our Headstart and kindergarten programmes are focused through a Blackfoot lens. Children access traditional Blackfoot language instruction, storytelling, music and elders' teachings. The centre uses a holistic approach to learning, incorporating extended family into the education of our children. Parents and grandparents are encouraged to participate and much of our programming

**Fig. 13.1** Blackfoot girl playing by the Old Man River that borders the Blood Indian Reserve and city of Lethbridge. (Photograph by Bill Healy)

**Fig. 13.2** Grandparents talking with their new grandson. (Photograph by Jessica Goodrider- Loewen)

focusses on the whole family, and not just on mainstream society's definition of the nuclear family.

Self-recognition of what's best for our children lies at the heart of our approaches in programmes and services. Our Blackfoot ways of knowing are dependent on relationship: relationship to each other but also to the land and the environment. Our interdependence in our modern world within urban centres also makes us cognizant that we must have relationships with mainstream society and the greater community. We have developed partnerships with other community agencies and post-secondary institutions.

One particular partnership, Raising Spirit, is a research project with Dr. Jan Newberry (associate professor of anthropology) from the local university, the University of Lethbridge. The project began when we started to examine programmes and service models that could potentially assist the families and children we work with. We noticed that may of the models did not 'fit' the Blackfoot worldview. Upon discussion with various stakeholders, we were advised that we might need to examine the traditional parenting and childrearing value systems of the Blackfoot. Articulating our traditional value systems would help assist us in decolonising our mindset about childrearing. Our goal was ultimately to restore our Indigenous approach to childrearing practices, particularly from the Blackfoot perspective.

**Fig. 13.3** Blackfoot cousins playing. (Photograph by Chantilly Prairie Chicken)

Although this undertaking was seemingly simple, we faced a multitude of challenges. How do we articulate something so implicit in our being as a value system? Are our traditional value systems still practiced and followed? How do we get people to articulate the values that are important to Blackfoot culture, specific to childrearing? Are these value systems still applicable and realistic?

We used photo-elicitation as a method to provoke a response from members of the Blackfoot community. This approach was based on the idea that these values exist but are not articulated formally. Instead, they are implicit and exist as everyday, mundane knowledge shared informally and anecdotally.2

We recruited Indigenous families to photograph everyday moments of childrearing and then asked why the photographers chose those things to photograph. Next, a subset of photographs (chosen by staff members and Indigenous researchers) were chosen and displayed around the community. We hoped to elicit responses from the broader community about Blackfoot childrearing values and practices. Short interviews were also conducted to hear people's reflections on their own values and experiences.

The next step of the research was to share these photographs with our Wisdom Committee of Elders. The elders discussed the childrearing value systems in the Blackfoot language and then translated these into English. The results of our project are still being analysed. So far, they are demonstrating that nuclear family models where women alone are held responsible for the care and conditions of our children are something that has been imposed through the violence of colonialism. Part of 'Indigenising' childrearing is a formal articulation of the traditional value systems which place childrearing and care for the world as a collective responsibility.

It is our belief that traditional childrearing practices of the Blackfoot people will guide us to develop more effective programming for parent education and support, family reunification and early childhood education.

**Fig. 13.4** Father connecting with his son. (Photograph by Alison Crop Eared Wolf)

#### NOTES

# Section 3 Political Projects and Movement Building

# 14 'Too young to wed'

*Envisioning a 'generous encounter' between feminism and the politics of childhood*

Virginia Caputo

# Introduction1

Children, as Sharon Stephens noted in her groundbreaking work *Children and the Politics of Culture* (1995), live their lives at the intersection of local and global processes. These processes intensify interactions and movements of people, ideas, images and things. Stephens's insightful analysis focused specifically on considering children's lives in view of global neoliberalism by troubling the notion of culture as part of this context for understanding childhood. In arguing that children's lives are entwined with, and affected by, global forces, Stephens pointed to the circulation of Eurocentric ideas of childhood within the realm of internationally circulating signs, goods, labour and capital. Childhood becomes a symbol of nature and an object of protection through this circulation, an ideal held up against the realities of children's lives in changing conditions and in diverse world regions and social contexts. One of Stephens's concerns was that through this circulation, the category 'child' – like the category 'woman' – risks becoming essentialised and homogenised, thereby obscuring the diversity that constitutes it in local contexts. 2

Stephens's work to link globalisation and childhood was timely and significant. Her expansive thinking brought together insights from anthropology, feminism and childhood studies to explore global political, cultural and social transformations and how they articulate with substantive changes in children's lives. Importantly, her view of 'culture' as a theoretically and politically contested term was set alongside a dynamic concept of childhood in a time of far-reaching local and global change and uncertainty.3

Following Stephens, childhood scholars have continued to expand their analyses of children's lives in global political-economic contexts. Anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent (1999), for instance, suggest that children are both affected by global politicaleconomic conditions and, in turn, affect everyday practices embedded in local-level interactions. Their work considers a cultural politics of childhood and its articulation with local instances of violence. Implicit in the arguments put forward by all three of these scholars are several shared concerns of feminist and childhood studies:4 to view power through a matrix of gender and other social lines of difference; to understand the intersection of global political-economic systems with systematic disadvantage and oppression in actual people's lives; to account for the social and cultural characteristics of inequalities that give rise to gendered harmful practices, including discrimination and violence, that affect both women and children; and to acknowledge that through globalising forces, once-localised representations of the 'child', like that of 'woman', circulate on a global landscape where they are made meaningful and deployed in diverse contexts.

In this chapter, I use a feminist childhood studies lens through which to view the issue of the early and forced marriage of girls.5 Over the past decade, this issue has emerged as one of concern and urgency on the global stage.6 I take up this inquiry with a particular interest in the representation and rhetoric that accompanies circulating images of children and childhood from the global South. For this analysis, the photo exhibit Too Young to Wed serves as a focal point. The exhibit debuted at the first United Nations International Day of the Girl in New York in 2012. It was sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund7 as part of a globally launched initiative to end the early and forced marriage of girls worldwide.8,9 Audiences in places around the world, as well as virtually, have viewed the images.10 By using a feminist childhood studies lens, I explore the contours of the politics of visibility and invisibility arising from this circulation and the implications this has for social change.

Specifically, I advance three arguments. First, that forced marriage, situated at the nexus of feminism and childhood studies, is an embodied practice that, as Lila Abu-Lughod notes,11 encodes local social and cultural dynamics in broader contexts of politics, poverty, patriarchy and culture. Regardless of their age, women and children are positioned through forced marriage as victims, as property or commodities in a system that devalues and dehumanises children and infantilises women. This treatment marks the conceptual connection between children and women in forced marriage as less than fully human. Images of the forced marriage of girls in the Too Young to Wed photo exhibit extend this connection through representations that guarantee children's dependency, passivity and silence, and secure their victimhood through a paternalistic rhetoric that focuses primarily on rescue and protection.

The rhetoric of rescue and protection is key to the second argument advanced in this chapter. Too Young to Wed circulates images of girls of the global South to receptive audiences in the industrialised North in a play of distant viewers and visual objects. The rhetoric that accompanies the exhibit frames the relationship between viewers and subjects in the images; namely, girls in a forced marriage are to be pitied and protected from cultural contexts that are viewed as backward, ignorant and 'barbaric'. This framing all but negates the agency of those images to powerfully engage viewers in questioning what is being expressed and makes inaudible the voices and lived experiences of the girls themselves. It is a situation reminiscent of Gayatri Spivak's question: 'Can the subaltern speak?'12 Spivak points to the power-laden process of *giving* silenced 'others' a voice with which to express their own lives and experiences. She argues that global power relations erase the lived experiences of those living in the global South by replacing them with knowledge about the global South. This knowledge is generated and rearranged so that it is made palpable and intelligible. In effect, this process makes it impossible for the 'subaltern' to speak. Moreover, it unproductively detaches knowledge from its context and produces it without accounting for the experiences of people themselves. Knowledge that emerges in this way, Spivak argues, merely reproduces narratives that reinforce Western dominance and authority.13 This process of 'speaking for' those in positions of powerlessness occurs in the Too Young to Wed exhibit where images and rhetoric further reinforce the cultural divide between viewers and the exhibit's visual objects. The division between girls of the industrialised North and girls living in the global South is clear. What emerges in this paternalistic process is an 'Us/Them' binary that assigns benevolent agency to the dominant 'Us' of the West, and victimisation and passivity to the subordinate 'Them' of the global South, who are imagined as oppressed and in need of rescue and protection.14

In writing on the politics of visuality and interpreting images in the 1970s, Susan Sontag points to a similar situation in the images of victims of war. She questions whether or how photographs connect to truth or reality, arguing that 'photographs of the victims of war are themselves species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.'15 Sontag's insightful comments regarding images as rhetoric that flatten complexity bring me to the third argument that I advance in this chapter. I query whether Too Young to Wed fulfills its goal to galvanise political action to end early and forced marriage or whether the images fuel the rhetoric of rescue and protection and obscure truths about people's lives only to reveal 'partial truths'. What are the consequences of circulating these images? Do the images foster understanding and solidarity with those experiencing early and forced marriage or do they serve to bolster imperialist rhetoric that may exacerbate rather than alleviate problems of forced marriage, moving no closer to ending the practice?

In examining these arguments, I echo Sara Ahmed's call for a 'generous encounter',16 one that unravels and complicates the mutual interests, conceptual dependencies and theoretical conflicts and tensions between women and children. Considering a 'generous encounter' between feminism and the politics of childhood for exploring early and forced marriage is not, as Ahmed argues, a plea for commonalities and equivalencies. Rather, as she acknowledges, while there is incommensurability at some level, it does not necessarily mean that they cannot co-exist in relation to each other.17 Further, Ahmed notes that the effort is not to move beyond oppositions that totalise and refuse the 'other';18 rather it is to argue for 'an economy' which includes conflicting and competing co-existence. This seems to be a particularly appropriate strategy for exploring forced marriage given that feminist interest in children and childhood in the past has often positioned children as adversaries rather than women's contemporaries, with more differences than commonalities.19 Forced marriage provides an opportunity to highlight these commonalities and explore tensions and mutual interests that arise. Thus, I invoke Ahmed's notion of a 'generous encounter' to contemplate the resemblances between the lives of children and women without hierarchy. In doing so, forced marriage becomes a context within which childhood and womanhood emerge as categories of experience. This formulation is far from the one that might be proposed by Firestone, who might call for the obliteration of childhood altogether (see Zehavi, this volume). Rather, for feminism and the politics of childhood, envisioning this 'generous encounter' appears to offer a productive approach that enriches understanding of lived experiences, interrupts adult-centricity, and reflects the challenges of theorising and practice in contemporary dynamic contexts. It seems to me that an invigorated position emerges from which to conceptually move across, through and around, rather than beyond, the barriers of binaries including child/adult and girl/woman. At a broader level still, forced marriage may offer the possibility to produce what Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty argue, is a shared sense of 'engagement based on empathy and on a vision of justice for everyone'.20

When I first encountered the practice of the early and forced marriage of girls, I felt frustrated by the tendency to treat it as a problem of vulnerable, helpless and silent girls. It reminded me of portrayals of women similarly imaged as passive and victimised.21 My concern was heightened by an opportunity to work closely with the Too Young to Wed exhibit in 2013.22 I began to more fully understand and question the scope of the exhibit's reach to both live and virtual audiences around the world.23 Drawing on feminist and post-colonial critiques, I queried the relations of 'knowing' offered by the set of circulating images of children and childhoods and questioned how political action can be constituted through visuality. Of particular concern was the repeated deployment of the notion of 'barbarity', which was linked to particular societies by those hoping to raise awareness of the scope and consequences of the practice. The phrase was used, for example, at the UN General Assembly in 2013 during the introduction of the first ever stand-alone resolution condemning early and forced child marriage: proponents called for an end to the 'barbaric' practice.24

The child protection, legal and non-governmental communities rose to the challenge to find ways to end the practice. They explored legislative, activist and protectionist avenues alongside political attempts.25 Notably, what marks many of the efforts directed at ending early and forced marriage is a focus on saving and protecting girls that, when cast within a global neoliberal framing (as Stephens suggests), relies on individual rather than communal and structural solutions to ending such a practice. These solutions sometimes neglect to consider the contexts in which girls live amid adults. They also fail to attend to the cultural politics of childhood and how ideologies of girlhood, childhood and womanhood intersect in locales that naturalise what it means to be a girl or a child. This occurs in part because of the tenacity of dominant Eurocentric notions of childhood and girlhood that rest firmly on vulnerability, innocence and a lack of agency. By emptying out the significance of the contexts of early and forced marriage, and obscuring what gives rise to the inequalities that fuel this practice, such efforts render girls as failing: failing to be resilient, or to stay in school, or to manage their own reproductive health. This casting back to individuals works hand in hand with a rhetoric that positions those in the industrialised North as authority figures who are able to guide those located in the global South in overcoming their problems and to help them to 'acquire the characteristics of civilized peoples, and take their place alongside them in the world'.26

# Early and forced child marriage at the nexus of feminism and a politics of childhood27

Scholarly research reveals that some of the challenges of early and forced marriage are due, in part, to complex definitional issues. Forced marriage, for example, becomes early marriage when we pay attention to cultural understandings of age and capacity. Concepts of consent and coercion come to the foreground as well, marking the definition of early and forced marriage as complicated terrain.28

In addition to definitional challenges, early and forced marriage has garnered attention from legal and human rights scholars. In analyzing the practice they appeal to human rights instruments including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women 1979, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989. A 2006 UN study on all forms of violence against women highlights in its definition of forced marriage a lack of meaningful consent. Further, the Convention Against Slavery considers forced marriage a 'slavery-like' practice29 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, applying to all people under the age of 18 years, states that this practice is a violation of children's rights.

#### Scope and context of early and forced marriage

According to the United Nations Children's Fund, over 700 million women today were married before they reached the age of 18.30 Ideology, power, legal responses and language are some of the factors that fuel the practice of forced marriage, coupled with contexts characterised by oppressive patriarchal social structures, gender discrimination, poverty and inequality. When enmeshed with cultural attitudes and religious practices, these factors help to sustain the practice in diverse local contexts. In contexts affected by war and conflict, the conditions for early and forced marriage are further exacerbated.

To consider these factors in turn, let us look first at how ideological aspects drive and sustain the practice of the forced marriage of girls. Feminist and childhood scholars argue that one of the conditions that makes girls and women vulnerable and susceptible to forced marriage is a process of devaluation that rests on the notion of girls and women as less than fully human.  The slippage between childhood, girlhood and womanhood locates girls on unstable conceptual terrain. Moreover, dehumanisation as a process acts to guarantee their dependency by enforcing passivity and restricting agency.31 Situated in positions of relative powerlessness and ensconced in families that are in turn embedded in communities, for girls in these contexts, control is at the heart of the practice of forced and early marriage. The practice is linked too with sexuality and gender relations, as well as culturally situated ideas about girlhood, womanhood, family obligations and honour.

Within these local contexts, legal responses to early and forced marriage are complicated as well. For example, while the practice may be prohibited in civil or common law, customary laws and practices may condone it. This means that decisions regarding early and forced marriage may be made in terms of securing a daughter's future by 'marrying' her with an older male, while other decisions are concerned with the larger family unit by using 'marriage' as an opportunity to connect families and create alliances through reciprocity systems, or to enable access to resources such as land. These decisions may have tremendous personal consequences for individual girls' physical and emotional health: the well-being of the family or community is effectively allowed to supersede that of the girl.32 As Carolyn Archambault notes with regard to early and forced marriage in the life of a Maasai girl named Esther,33

In light of the circumstances in which Esther's father's decision was made and his intentions, he shifts from a symbol of patriarchal oppression to a persona of a concerned father. No longer simply a violator of his daughter's rights to an education, he can be understood as a victim himself of economic, ecological, and political forces beyond his control that render the path that would attain security for Esther (and other young women like her) more uncertain.

#### 'Barbarism' and rescuing and protecting girls

The connection between barbarism and early and forced marriage plays a powerful role in sustaining the practice. The term 'barbaric' captures a constellation of meanings from notions of cruelty and brutality to backwardness and uncivilised ignorance.34 Moreover, labelling a practice such as early and forced marriage as 'barbaric' has strategic and powerful consequences. It encodes a paternalistic stance and reinforces geographic and cultural distances that set up a dichotomy of locales where the practice does or supposedly does not occur.35 Indeed, deploying the term 'barbaric' firmly attaches the practice to persons living in particular localities; in turn, this aids in justifying interventions in their lives. As Dana Cloud argues with regard to circulating images of Afghan women, they serve to 'establish the barbarity of a society in which women are profoundly oppressed'.36 Cloud analyses the ways images of Afghan women circulate alongside a 'clash of civilizations' rhetoric that reproduces the narrative of a 'white man's burden'.37 Stabile and Kumar go a step further to argue that the visibility of Afghan women in the post-9/11 context was used to sell the war to the US public by constructing the West as 'a beacon of civilization with an obligation to tame the Islamic world and liberate its women'.38 In the example of Too Young to Wed, the discourse of barbarism legitimises calls for an end to the practice in the lives of those living in the global South.

### Too Young to Wed as political photography

Too Young to Wed circulates images to audiences in the industrialised North in both live and virtual spaces. Some viewers will see in the images an unmediated and authentic replica of reality, while others will recognise the photographer's influence in constructing these images for particular effect. Lutz and Collins describe the politics of what viewers 'see' as 'political photography',39 where images are used to educate and motivate viewers who wish to see social change. They argue that rhetorical strategies combined with images expose audiences to human suffering and 'often operate by encouraging an empathic involvement with the photographed subject – a desire to intervene directly with the frame of the photograph in order to ease the depicted pain or comfort a hungry child'.40 Lutz and Collins posit that by portraying people living in the global South as exotic, idealised and natural, viewers in the industrialised North are situated both in opposition and authoritatively.41

It is hardly a coincidence that the Too Young to Wed photo exhibit distances early and forced marriage from any association with those living in industrialised Northern countries; none of the girls in the images are located in a North American or European context. This omission is significant for it accomplishes a number of things: first, it displaces the practice of early and forced marriage elsewhere, creating an insularity and providing the comfort of distance to the viewers of the images. Second, by framing the practice as an issue for girls located in the global South, this focus diverts attention away from equally oppressive and patriarchal practices that affect the lives of girls in the industrialised North.42 Further, framing this practice through a discourse situated firmly within Eurocentric ideas of childhood and girlhood makes the problem appear as though located in places both geographically and culturally distant from the industrialised North. The rhetoric obscures many reasons for this practice: the poverty experienced by families who cannot afford to provide for their daughters; security for girls and their well-being as future adult women; devaluation of daughters in comparison with sons; debts and/or conflicts that can be settled through early and forced marriage in order to address threats to family relationships. In this culturally and politically charged landscape, girls are portrayed as a problem to be remedied.43 In the Too Young to Wed example, governments appear to deliver solutions that may or may not have any resonance in the contexts and circumstances in which girls live: that is, by keeping girls in school, assisting them in choosing to delay marriage, offering information about reproductive health and training in life skills to make them better wives and mothers at a later time in their lives. These 'solutions' may or may not bring early and forced marriage to an end.44

Moreover, paternalism emerges when the issue of early and forced marriage is displaced to people living in the global South. What remain hidden are the social and political-economic dimensions of this global issue. Attention is diverted away from government policies, international trade agreements and other political arrangements that tie the very governments that are championing the campaign to end early and forced marriage to the local contexts in which the practice continues to flourish.

The photo exhibit appears to mimic this strategy of deflection and individualisation through the very composition of the images. For instance, in many of the exhibit's images, girls are depicted alone, pictured outside of familiar contexts of family and community, placed against gloomy backdrops or in open and vast unpopulated landscapes. If not alone they are with a child or husband, further reinforcing their roles as wives and mothers. The imaging engenders a sense of isolation, quiet desperation and powerlessness and, by extension, reinforces the practice as if it takes place in isolation from other relationships, which is hardly the case. The solution to the problem of early and forced marriage appears in equally simplistic terms: to halt the practice.

This strategy of individualisation and decontextualisation is a powerful one, yet it is hardly surprising that it occurs in a neoliberal globalised era. As Xiaobei Chen has argued, the twenty-first century has produced the birth of 'the new child-victim citizen'.45 Moreover, at a broader political level, it also reflects, among other things, a shift to a renewed political interest in children, and in this example, girls. The increased attention to girls as a concern for foreign policy is remarkable given the lack of political will that has been a much more common occurrence in relation to girls.46

#### An economy of visibility and invisibility

Too Young to Wed is both compelling and contradictory. On one hand, the photographs are aesthetically beautiful; on the other, the images offer viewers meanings that may be understood in unintended ways. The power of the photographs compels viewers to consider the multiple meanings of girls and girlhood, including girls as children who experience a loss of childhood, girls as 'becoming women', girls as brides, girls as victims of violence and girls as mothers. The process of determining which meanings become 'real' to viewers and which ones remain invisible is part of the sense-making that viewers undertake, selecting some elements and leaving others aside. Feminist communications scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser calls this process 'an economy of visibility'47 to describe the relationship between viewers and those who are imaged. This economy consists of an interplay between visibility and invisibility whereby something appears, circulates and becomes exchanged. In Too Young to Wed, the girls and their suffering are circulated, exchanged and become 'real'. Banet-Weiser explores this process for the possibilities it holds in transforming oneself into a commodity in social media as a space of visibility for girls. If Banet-Weiser's argument is extended to the Too Young to Wed images, given the viewership of this exhibit worldwide and the many different audiences it has reached, we must consider the implications of turning girls into commodities or what Claudia Aradau argues are 'spectral presences on the scene of politics'48.

Related questions emerge. Who assesses the value of what is circulated in such an exchange, for whom and with what consequences? Too Young to Wed offers viewers an instance to suppress and replace details of girls' lives and experiences with meanings that are consistent with dominant Eurocentric notions of girlhood and ideal childhood. In its quest to raise awareness and end early and forced marriage, does Too Young to Wed clear a space of visibility for *actual* girls so that the practice might end, as the UNFPA initiative suggests? Or does the exhibit merely provide another space of *invisibility* for girls' lives, wherein securing their human rights remains outside of their grasp? As the photo exhibit circulates, it engages viewers with girls' suffering framed within an ethos of compassion. Compassion enables viewers to 'suffer' with the girls, yet at a distance. Viewers of the images become 'witnesses' to the suffering of girls. Following Hannah Arendt,49 if compassion is actualised in situations in which those who do not suffer meet and come face to face with those who do, distance becomes a political dimension that has the effect of unifying across spatial and temporal locations. This interaction comprises what has been called a 'politics of pity',50 one that does not attach itself in a localised way yet cannot completely free itself from the local and particular either.

In Too Young to Wed, we see this dimension unfold when audiences view the images of girls through a lens of compassion. Compassion grounds these elements that create both an intimacy with viewers as well as a comfortable distance from the subjects of the images. By masking the diversity of those experiencing early and forced marriage, the images appear to exacerbate this distance. Devoid of contextual details, they homogenise girls' lives into a unified representation of girlhood so that early and forced marriage appears as a singular, integrated issue. Postcolonial childhood and feminist scholars including Sarada Balagopalan,51 Olga Nieuwenhuys,52 and Erica Burman53 have argued that this compression and glossing-over of the intricacies of how local and global forces intertwine is partly an effect of the circulation of liberal categories like freedom, rights and equality. They argue that their repetition in postcolonial contexts produces children's lives in limited ways, against a Eurocentric, bourgeois notion of childhood as a global ideal.54

The politics of pity is not only apparent in the photo exhibit: it is used too in interventions orchestrated in international politics. As we see in high-level political gatherings at the UN, discussions of early and forced child marriage are framed by unifying notions of 'poor victims' and 'barbaric' practices. These discussions feature tokenistic participation by articulate young women on high-level panels who are asked to speak on behalf of all girls who have experienced early and forced marriage. These appeals to emotion in turn create superficial solidarities that employ a politics of pity combined with a rhetoric of rescue and protection. Activism through these solidarities manifests as a real possibility linking pity with praxis. Claudia Aradau has written extensively about the way this works in the lives of trafficked women.  These emotions drive political interventions and strategies of governance.'55 As Aradau notes, 'from the war on terror to interventions in crisis situations (e.g., famine and natural catastrophes), political actions depend on and are limited by emotions'.56 For girls who are, as Aradau says, placed among categories of individuals who are 'non-dangerous', this is a particularly salient point. Indeed, like the figure of the 'child', the figure of the 'girl' enables a 'safe' intervention for those who engage with it because girls are situated in relative positions of powerlessness vis-à-vis adults. Aradau argues that for trafficked women, *'*if human rights have become the rights of those who are too weak or too oppressed to actualize and enact them, they are not "their" rights. They are deprived of political agency; the only rights are our rights to practice pity and humanitarian interventions. Victims are therefore divorced from the very possibility of political agency . . .'.57 Consider how for girls imaged in the Too Young to Wed photo exhibit, it appears the exclusion of their political agency is guaranteed.

It behooves us, therefore, to carefully contemplate whose interests are served by silent, decontextualised images of girls in the global South, circulated to audiences in the industrialised North. It befits questioning interventions to end the practice of early and forced marriage framed by rights discourses and governmental efforts to attend to, and uphold, girls' rights. While these efforts no doubt bring attention to the matter as well as positioning girls on political agendas from which they, like women, might otherwise continue to be excluded, I would argue that they also extend and ignite foreign policy relations in problematic ways. To be clear, the problem is not that governments have a stake in reducing violence in girls' and women's lives, whether because it has implications on the stability of their own countries, for health costs or other reasons. Instead, and what may be less apparent, the issue is the connection between eliminating girls' suffering – in this case by ending the practice of early and forced marriage – and the *kind* of political attention it garners, for whom and for which purposes. Again, Aradau makes a similar point in the case of trafficked women, arguing that 'the elimination or alleviation of suffering is part of a process of governing, of social re-ordering, in which the causes of suffering are eradicated, dealt with or transformed. In governmental terms such an intervention has not only to represent and constitute a particular situation, but also to confer particular identities upon subjects.'58

Too Young to Wed confers identities to girls that are both complex and political. As it circulates specific sets of meanings and discourses regarding their lives, framed by compassion and pity as well as rescue and protection, Too Young to Wed has the potential to exacerbate the challenges for actual girls rather than improve them. By visually encoding ideas about girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, culture, consent and coercion, it helps to shape connections, conceptually and substantively, in an economy of visibility that both facilitates and impedes the goal of ending early and forced marriage. It impedes by engaging audiences in a politics that *may not* translate into an active force within the political arena and that may oppose some children against others by deeming some lives (i.e. those of children living in the industrialised North) more valuable than others. It is political in that it captures viewers' emotional responses but keeps the girls in a state of what scholar Luc Boltanski has called 'distant suffering',59 a divide that may ultimately work against active engagement and social change for the *actual* empowerment of girls as called for by the international community.

# To conclude

I opened this chapter recalling Sharon Stephens' words on the importance of highlighting the politics of childhood, and of troubling the notion of culture in contexts framed by global neoliberalism and marked by poverty and rising inequality. Women's and children's lives and interests emerge as intertwined and demonstrates how they can be productively considered in dynamic socio-political and globalised contexts. Stephens compels us to pay attention to children in relational ways with adults and to account for the conditions of their lives within a broader global political-economic and sociocultural framing. She views children not only as 'on their way to becoming' full members of society but as fully present among adults and important to what matters politically, economically, socially and culturally in the world. Her words remind us to understand children's experiences, like those of women, in their locally unique and relational situations, combined with the external forces that drive and affect their lives and, in turn, affect and intertwine with the lives of women. I would argue that this conceptual and political intertwining emerges through a generous encounter between feminism and a politics of childhood. Using the example of Too Young to Wed, I have pointed out what an increased visibility has to do with conceptualising the figure of the child as a powerful symbol of the future, as well as a locus for the present interplay of local and global forces that challenges childhood, girlhood and womanhood in contemporary contexts. Thus the contribution of this chapter has been to theorise childhood in a way that reimagines the mutual interests, conceptual dependencies and tensions between women and children through the example of forced marriage. Forced marriage provides an opportunity to contemplate the resemblances and tensions between the lives of children and women without hierarchy when envisaged as a context within which both childhood and womanhood are constituted and emerge as viable categories of experience.

#### NOTES

# 15 Feminists' strategic role in early childhood education

Sri Marpinjun, Nindyah Rengganis, Yudha Andri Riyanto, and Fransisca Yuni Dhamayanti

The Early Childhood Care and Development Resource Centre (ECCD RC) was co-founded by Lembaga Studi dan Pengembangan Perempuan dan Anak (Institute for Women's and Children's Studies and Development; LSPPA), an organisation formed in 1991 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, to introduce women's and children's rights to the people. The founders of LSPPA were university students whose research indicated that most citizens did not know about gender issues, gender equality perspectives and analysis, and the laws which support women's rights. While the National Constitution (UUD 45) and some Acts of Parliament were progressive in that they followed UN conventions on human rights, women's rights and children's rights, in practice women and children were still in trouble. For instance, child marriage and maternal mortality remained issues in the country. Many Indonesians did not understand the concept of 'rights', and the problems facing women and children were not viewed as abuses of the rights of women and children.

As a result, LSPPA's main programme in the 1990s was to disseminate information and stimulate discussions about gender inequality in the Indonesian context. The organisation hosted public discussions and seminars, published scholarly books and engaged in economic empowerment activities with poor women in rural areas. It also joined the local and national chapters of the Alliance in Gender Equality to support policy and regulation changes.

After seven years spent focusing on gender inequality issues with citizens, we found that our strategies were not very effective. We expected positive responses from the audiences in every forum we organised. What we got was resistance. We understood that adults would not change the attitudes, ideas and practices that they had believed in since they were young. They thought that gender and feminism were alien to our culture and should be rejected. They argued that our culture was fine in terms of gender equality. The rejections also included threatening phone calls: callers said they would kill LSPPA's leaders and burn our office. We were exhausted mentally, and we felt that we were not achieving our goals because the resistance of those whom we were targetting for change was too strong. Also, other women's organisations were offering similar programmes, so we thought that as feminist activists we could combine our efforts towards achieving social justice.

These factors led us to develop new strategies. In 1998, we launched our programme to influence the early childhood education system. Our focus did not actually move away from women's issues; we remained committed to promoting gender equality in and through early childhood education. This change in our activities was based on our analysis that people learn to become a woman or man, and about gender roles, when they are very young. Early childhood care and development became LSPPA's new brand.

Why early childhood?

**Fig. 15.1** Early Childhood Care and Development Resource Centre (Yogyakarta, Indonesia). (Source: ECCDRC Yogyakarta)

Children start learning about identities in the early years of their life and begin to form their gender identities by the time they are two to three years old. This is an opportunity for feminists! Through our early childhood work, we want to show the strategic role of women/feminists in ensuring girls and boys can develop identities that are equal with others and that they can feel proud about themselves, not inferior or superior to others.

Child caring is not a new job for women; however many women have not utilised this job to contribute to achieving social justice. Many women are still acting as agents of injustice in a culture that marginalises women and minority groups. Some women choose to focus on their careers and ignore children. In contrast, the ECCD RC invites women (and men) to join together to improve the quality of early childhood education through feminist principles such as equality, inclusion, diversity and freedom from all violence. We mean to harness 'education' to transform patriarchal culture.

#### ECCD RC programmes

The ECCD RC runs a number of initiatives:

	- a.
	- b. Engage with women's rights as well as children's rights and the importance of children's voice.
	- c. Identify gender/culture bias in ECE and provide an inclusive education for young children.
	- d. Set up an equal learning environment for girls and boys.
	- a. Facilitating high-quality interactions between children.
	- b. Ensuring girls and boys can access any learning materials.
	- c. Specialised curriculum.
	- d. Provision of an equal learning environment. Teachers ensure that all girls and boys are able to learn about equality in terms of access and control and that all children feel safe, invited, involved and treated equally.

**Fig. 15.2** Teachers reflect upon what it means to be men and women. (Source: ECCDRC Yogyakarta)

**Fig. 15.3** Girls and boys have equal access to learning materials. (Source: ECCDRC Yogyakarta)

**Fig. 15.4** Children learn to work together and respect others. (Source: ECCDRC Yogyakarta)

	- a. A women's leadership policy, which states that the director of ECCD RC must be a woman.
	- b. A staffing policy which encourages men and people from minority groups to become learning facilitators for children and ensures fair recruitment of staff regardless of the minority group they come from or their sexual orientation.
	- c. An enrollment policy designed to ensure girls and boys are enrolled regardless of ability, race and social class, and allocates spaces for poor children.
	- d. A class policy which ensures that each class has two facilitators of different genders (if possible) so that children can experience learning with female and male facilitators and so children see that men can become educators for young children.
	- e. A fatherhood policy which provides one month's leave for male staff with a newborn child (as the government only gives one week of fatherhood leave).

**Fig. 15.5** Mapping parents' and teachers' experiences of violence. (Source: ECCDRC Yogyakarta)

**Fig. 15.6** Involving fathers and mothers in an outing. (Source: ECCDRC Yogyakarta)

To be a feminist is to be a fighter for social justice. It is through our struggle, and analysis of our experiences, that we can develop a vision for achieving social justice. This may mean changing our strategies based on changing contexts. Our work demonstrates that early childhood is one of the arenas where feminists can challenge patriarchy. Focusing on early childhood involves redefining the role of women (and men) in rearing children, as well as ensuring all girls and boys feel good about themselves and equal with others.

# 16 'Gimme shelter'? *Complicating responses to family violence*

Sevasti-Melissa Nolas, Erin Sanders-McDonagh and Lucy Neville

Responses to domestic violence, such as those codified in state and voluntary sector service provision, have historically provided both 'common ground' and 'contested' territory for thinking about the intersections between feminism and the politics of childhood.1 Drawing on the evaluation of a voluntary sector programme, the Community Group Programme for children and their mothers in London, England,2 the chapter explores 'the (im)possibilities of dialogue'3 across feminism and childhood for those children and women/mothers who have experienced family violence. We argue that drawing children, as active meaning makers, into the analysis of and responses to domestic violence offers a way of extending the possibilities of social support systems in ways that can further strengthen women's recovery experiences, as well as benefitting children and young people themselves. At the same time, we argue that the focus on the mother–child couple does not take us far enough in complicating responses to domestic violence. Our intention in the analysis presented here is to imagine more complex and contextualised responses to domestic violence. An analysis that focuses on the messy actualities of practice responses4 has the potential to recruit further interlocutors into the fold and move the practice conversation beyond its currently exclusive focus on women as heterosexual mother-victims and children as genderless witnesses (and sometimes victims) to predominantly male-perpetrated violence. Troubling these categories can help to complicate responses to *family* violence that are sensitive to a diversity of genders, ages, sexualities and cultures, extending service provision to young men and to heterosexual and homosexual fathers who may have experienced violence (from female or male partners, respectively), as well as lesbian mothers and parents of both or either gender who experience violence from their children and mothers/fathers.5

# Thinking through case studies

The Community Group Programme (CGP) is a psychoeducational 12 week programme designed for children 'exposed to woman abuse'.6 The programme developed in London, Ontario (Canada) in the late 1980s and early 1990s and focused on working with children and their mothers who had left a violent family relationship. The programme aims to strengthen child–mother relationships and to support children in processing their experiences of witnessing or experiencing woman abuse. Children are encouraged to recognise, name and explore the multiplicity of feelings surrounding incidences of their mother's abuse and are given opportunities to respond to these feelings using creative methods (e.g. arts and crafts) in a safe space facilitated by professionals, and in the company of peers who have had similar experiences. A parallel series of groups with mothers assists women in supporting their children with coming to terms with their experiences.

The programme emerged out of research and clinical practice (in family therapy), following observations by clinicians that no local provisions existed for supporting children and youth affected by domestic violence.7 The original programme was firmly located within a discourse of 'woman abuse', a feminist perspective that casts domestic violence as a gendered crime committed by men against women. At the same time the programme was also rooted in a deep concern for children's experiences and their needs, which the programme originators saw as largely unmet. The idea of working with, and strengthening the relationship between, children and their mothers is a key theoretical component of the CGP.

In many ways, the programme is typical of framings of domestic violence which rely on particular feminist interpretations of genderbased violence – situating men as violent/perpetrators and women as oppressed/victims. For example, Women's Aid, one of the leading domestic violence charities in the UK, defines domestic violence as a form of patriarchal violence that disproportionately impacts women: 'Domestic abuse perpetrated by men against women is a quantitatively and qualitatively distinct phenomenon rooted in women's unequal status in society and oppressive social constructions of gender and family'.8 The idea that it is predominantly women who are victims of domestic violence is certainly not unwarranted. In the UK, statistics suggest that women are overwhelmingly present in reported incidents of domestic violence,9 men are four times more likely to perpetrate violence than women,10 and the violence perpetrated against women by men is often more severe in nature.11 As such, many programmes that seek to provide help and support for those experiencing domestic violence focus on women as victims of domestic violence.

At the same time, the CGP was innovative in creating a childfocused *and* relational space, that was concerned with both individual (children or women) and shared (children-and-women) needs and experiences. In this respect, CGP is a good example of a turn towards more complex practices of intervening to support those who have experienced family violence – in this case children and their mothers. Through the CGP case study we highlight the various necessary relational struggles in contemporary responses to family violence. The analysis builds on an understanding of practice responses to social injustice as necessarily pluralistic and complex, and enmeshed in theories, methods, values and practices.12 By following these complexities and enmeshments new conceptualisations of family violence can emerge that are better able to engage with the multifarious experiences and needs of all involved.

# The (im)possibilities of dialogues?

Historically UK domestic violence services have drawn on particular feminist framings of gender-based violence, and focused efforts on ensuring the safety of women who have experienced domestic abuse. The impact of domestic violence on women's psychological health, well-being and social positioning has long been recognised, and the reality of domestic violence, and creating socially supportive responses to it, has played a pivotal role in the shaping of the women's movement.

However, it was not until the 1980s, with the collision between the categories of childhood, youth and risk in policy and practice and the institutionalisation of the children's rights movement, that children started to become a topic of public concern in relation to incidences of domestic violence. At the same time a new legal concept of parental responsibility emerged that saw parents and parenting increasingly scrutinised by the state.13 This historical shift has disrupted the well-established refuge practices that previously focused primarily on women, and new practices of support have begun to emerge that take mothers *and their children* into account.

With children coming to the fore, the tensions highlighted between women/mothers-and-children become salient.14 Burman argues that formulations such as 'womenandchildren' or 'women vs. children' are conceptually, politically and practically inadequate: the first because it perpetuates inequalities by essentialising both children and women's positions, and the second because it creates competitive and unhelpful divisions, maintaining a status quo that misses the needs of both parties. As such, Burman offers the useful conceptual framing of children and women being in 'a necessary struggle-in-relation'.15 This is a struggle that is encoded into the history of women's fights to bring child abuse to the attention of the state, as well as in the coining of the term 'battered woman syndrome' as a response and reaction to the 'battered child syndrome', which implicated mothers without acknowledging how complex maternal practices of protection can be.16 In the CGP training, for example, trainers often used the example of one former participant who reported smacking her child because she knew she could minimise the level of violence and hurt inflicted on her child if she intervened between her husband and their child and undertook the smacking action herself instead of leaving it to her partner.

In the UK, AVA, the charity which rolled out the CGP in London, did not use the term 'woman abuse'. Instead, the CGP was described as a programme 'to support children and women affected by domestic violence'. While the 'children and women' phrasing carries echoes of essentialism, the reversal of the order to 'childrenandwomen', we argue, has the potential for thinking through what Lisa Baraitser calls 'the ethics of interruption', those interruptions created by bringing children into the adult fold, which Baraitser argues have the potential to provide both children and their mothers 'new "raw materials" for experiencing [them]selves, others and our worlds' differently.17 Furthermore, the longer description leaves open the possibility to explore what Burman calls the 'complex relationalities and mutualities between [mothers'] mental and physical states and those of [their] children',18 and what Haaken has described as the common ground between women and children in calling on the state (or civil society in this case) to intervene on family violence.19

### An ethics of interruption?

Children's experiences of domestic violence, and the consequences of violence for them, have come to the fore in the last 25 years in Anglo-American contexts, on account of the introduction and ratification of the United Nations Convenion on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC; 1989), which has precipitated policy and practice changes towards more child-centred service provision.20 In England, for example (which is the main focus of this chapter), we have witnessed an increase in the commissioning of national evidence reviews to better understand and support children's experiences of domestic violence from a range of professional perspectives, including public health, social work and clinical psychology.21 A shift in focus to children's concerns with regards to family violence provides a number of creative junctures to rethink support for women and children. In this section, we re-read our evaluation report22 with a view to picking out three key ways in which bringing children and young people into the fold, and listening to the 'interruptions of the child',23 may contribute towards complicating responses to family violence.

#### Guilt and blame

Guilt and blame have been identified as key discourses in women's and children's accounts of experiencing domestic violence.24 However, such knowledge is based on mothers' and/or clinicians' perspectives and not on children's own experiences. These discourses have in turn fed into practice responses, including the CGP, where professionals delivering the programme repeatedly emphasised that children should not blame themselves for what happened. Our evaluation found that only a minority of the children made reference to the theme of self-blame in the qualitative research (*n*=3),25 and that the majority of children we surveyed identified that children are not to blame for parents' fighting both before *and* after taking part in the programme (with no significant shift taking place). This was surprising given how much emphasis both the programme manual and professionals placed on absolving children from blame, and the findings from previous programme evaluations that suggest that groups reduce self-blame.26 Instead the theme of blame was more prominent in mothers' accounts, with many mothers appearing to experience their children's anger and withdrawal as their punishment for what had happened. Yet in the questionnaire data (pre-groups) none of the children blamed their mothers for what happened. Neither did children blame themselves for their parents' fighting. More recent research on children's views of domestic violence suggests that children know whom to hold responsible for violence/abuse – this tends not to be themselves and is instead usually the abuser or both the parents.27 Taking children's and young people's perspectives into account can help develop a more nuanced analysis of emotional experiences of family violence that takes us beyond dichotomies of perpetrators and victims, guilt and blame.

#### Cycles of violence

A further challenge to established discourses used to frame experiences of family violence comes from the intersections of age and gender in childhood. In thinking about either women-and-children or women vs. children, children appear as genderless subjects to be subsumed under the gendered, female and largely heterosexual mother. The CGP, for example, which was designed to run with children and young people from the ages of 4 to 16, was explicit about gender not being an important consideration in convening a primary-school-aged group. In the Canadian manual, it was argued that mixed sex groups for adolescents could be productive for addressing gender-related issues. In England, the advice given to London practitioners was to run same-sex groups for older children where possible. This disaggregation was seen as especially important for girls as it helped 'to create a safe environment for disclosing personal information' but left young men (over 16s) occupying an especially precarious position with regards to the possibilities and limits of support.

Younger and adolescent boys presented a source of anxiety for mothers.  Some mothers hoped that the CGP might alter their sons' destinies without challenging the idea of 'violence as destiny':

...it was like my son was getting very, like, really arrogant behaviour, he was turning out just like his dad so I think, in a way, the groups really helped him. It's calmed him down a bit – but not as much as, you know, you'd expect (Beth, mother, lines 248–51).

They've started mimicking the partners' behaviours and, you know, you're just not wanting that, you don't want the future to be a repeat of the past... (Doris, mother, line 260).

Findings from interviews with coordinators highlighted their difficulties in breaking from popular yet contentious theories of domestic violence such as the 'cycle of violence' theory. 'Cycle of violence' theories are problematic and are not espoused by the programme.28 However, even where coordinators were aware of such problems they found it hard to deviate from the core metaphors provided by these theories:

...because I know that violence isn't automatically inter-generational...I see enough of it to know there's a greater propensity for children that have lived in violent homes ...You knew the parents, and now the children are in the same service ...Some of them you'd know as grandparents ...So the cycle has to stop somewhere, doesn't it? (Coordinator, Area 16).

Such discourses, particularly if they invoke convenient and easily grasped – as well as evocative – images of a problem, such as the image of a cycle that needs to be broken, are hard to shift even when the nuances of experience are understood. This suggests that a new metaphor is necessary in order to re-imagine historical discourses on domestic violence that would allow a safe environment for adolescent boys in particular to address their anxieties, as well as their mothers' concerns for them.

Reinstating the everyday

A final creative junction to established discourses for thinking about domestic violence emerged in considering children's experiences of the programme. These experiences largely focused on the space the programme had given children to rehabilitate their 'everyday' lives. In recounting what they enjoyed the most about the programme, children and young people reported valuing their time on the programme because it provided a fun space and fun food.

**Jenny:** We hide from the parents.

**MJ:** Yeah, that was the best thing about it.

**Cherry:** We was 'hiii' [sic], at the end, yeah, when the parents came to get us we used to make all these hiding places and always hid in them.

**Bugatti:** We played hide and seek.

**MJ:** We should do that again! We should all hide from the parents! (lines 381–98)

Children placed much more importance on the experience of fun and being together than they did on the learning derived from the programme.29 For us this was a reminder to be mindful of the multiple identities that children and their mothers occupy, which can be easily overlooked in simplistic, binary analyses of family violence. While seemingly banal observations, these reports can be read as an assertion of the value of everyday experiences themselves as important in providing sources of creativity and renewal.30 Hiding (previous quotation), which for many children would have previously been a practice of protection (to hide from violence in the home), is rehabilitated to a more pleasurable and thrilling experience of childhood hide-and-seek and the mischievous teasing of mothers. Our findings are echoed in research by Nicky Stanley and colleagues on young people's experiences and perceptions of specialist domestic violence services, with those young people who took part in the NSPCC research reporting that youth spaces 'gave us a break, it let us be children...we never had a chance to be children'.31 Children's experiences of the programme are an important reminder of the limitations of single identities (victim or witness, in this case) and the need for provisions that address children and women's multiple needs and identities.

### Separate and connected

Historically the women's movement has been instrumental in creating the foundations for a responsive infrastructure to domestic violence and child abuse. Much of that early infrastructure revolved around the creation of refuges, or shelters, for 'battered women' – temporary accommodation that women could access in order to physically remove themselves from a violent relationship. Shelters were an important feminist intervention, and later institution, and remain an important physical and symbolic space of refuge for women leaving violent relationships. More recently, however, with the joining up of academic research and good practice, international bodies such as the Council of Europe32 have advocated the need for a range of services in responding to domestic violence. These include helplines and shelters which offer immediate services, with 24-hour access to counselling and safe accommodation for women and children; early proactive services; short-term counselling and advocacy; trauma care and long-term support; and outreach work and mobile services.33

The CGP is, we believe, an example of a transitional moment in traditions of responding to domestic violence; a shift from responses that focused on an individual, liberal subject (the woman) to approaches that start to embrace what 'the maternal' means, namely a lifelong intersubjective and relational need to care and to be cared for.34 By bringing children into the fold the opportunity arises to rethink a number of foundational assumptions underpinning support practices.

Our own evaluation, and large mixed-methods studies on children's experiences of domestic violence,35 suggest that taking children's views seriously can open up new understandings of the emotional landscapes of family violence. The idea that guilt and blame, and the responsibilities those imply, may be the predominant emotional responses to violence experienced simplifies the affective assemblages of violence.36 It also places specific demands on women to assume a status of victimhood and children to reflect vulnerability in order to be worthy of collective concern, intervention and support services.37 Children and young people's responses to violence bring a family perspective to the fore, in that violence is perceived as an interaction between adults with varied consequences for children.

The persistent theory that violence is transmitted from fathers to sons, and a generalised anxiety about all men being perpetrators of violence, puts young men in an uncertain position, and can make access to support difficult. Boys' and young men's complex and nuanced understanding of themselves and their positions in the social world can be undermined by essentialised and binary understandings of gender.38 Research evidence also suggests that the pathways for inter-generational transmission of violence are far from direct, often requiring the coexistence of neglect as well as multiple forms of abuse in a person's life history.39 Persistent metaphors of the dynamics of violence can contribute to young men's precarity. In recognition of this AVA extended the provision of the programme up to 21 years of age, and developed an educational programme to address violence and abuse in teenage relationships. However, we are not sure to what extent this programme provides young men with the tools required to explore their own biographies and relationship patterns without being positioned as potential perpetrators.

Finally, listening to children's experiences of participating in social support provides an avenue for reframing the dominant identities ascribed and enacted to those affected by domestic violence. The children in both our evaluation and similar evaluations40 interrupted dominant responses that focus on safety and protection, reminding us through their narratives of their agency and participation. The shift from womenonly to 'the necessary struggle-in-relation' opens a space for theory and practice in family violence to go beyond the woman/mother-and-(genderless)-child couple relationship. In the final section of this chapter, we sketch out ways in which responses to family violence can be further complicated in the journey from individual and couple to family and community responses to violence.

# Imagining complexity

The focus on children in violent homes/families has coincided with an international and national triptych of trends characteristic of knowledgebased economies in late modernity: the institutionalisation of the evidence-based (medicine) movement,41 the rise in parenting cultures,42 and the systematic dismantling of the welfare state under neoliberalism and austerity policies.43 As such, we are at a point of witnessing a shift in the policy and practice landscape, from a framing of domestic violence and intimate partner violence as a 'woman-only' issue to a public child mental health issue.44 At the same time calls have been made in the literature for a more meaningful integration between feminist, sociological and childhood studies approaches,45 and a reimagining of the dynamics of, and responses to, experiences of domestic violence in order to generate new practices.

Given the shifting frameworks it is perhaps unsurprising that evaluation research finds that attempts for more holistic responses to domestic violence, both in terms of prevention and provision/intervention, are currently fragmented on the ground.46 In the CGP the relational message given in the training was often at odds with the programme commitment to a 'gender-based analysis' of violence. At the same time, the practitioners' responses47 suggest that the transitional moment that we are arguing the programme represents was well recognised. Practitioners identified the programme as providing children *and* mothers a start to recovery; the child-centred nature of the programme was well understood and in their accounts of the programme a number of the guiding principles, such as respecting and listening to children, were well articulated. Professionals also identified the programme as neither a parenting programme nor a woman abuse group, but, rather, something in between. Professionals varied in the extent to which they found the feminist theoretical underpinning of the programme useful for practice, and often drew on other bodies of knowledge (theoretical and policy) to make aspects of the programme theory more meaningful to them.

It is our argument in this chapter that the well-being of children *and* women can be improved when an attempt is made to work through the necessary tensions embodied in their relationship. Children and women are inevitably connected at the same time as also having separate cares and concerns. The next generation of responses to family violence needs to build on these emergent understandings of responses to domestic violence as a 'struggle-in-relation' in order to think about the broader contexts and ecologies in which violence takes place. In thinking about the plurality of relationships that are implicated and explicated in thinking about family violence, consideration also needs to be given to relationships beyond the heterosexual couple/family (partners; parent–child).

The need for such consideration is important for the well-being of all involved, but is most starkly illustrated in family relationships that do not conform to the normative conceptions that were embedded in the CGP model. Women's decisions to leave a violent relationship are multi-faceted (especially where a woman has children) and often involve multiple and complex considerations about her own and her children's safety, housing, finances, immigration status and access to legal information.48 The most internationally comprehensive reviews of the research evidence on identifying and responding to domestic violence49 suggest that advocacy, outreach and information services can play an important role in mediating a woman's decision to leave a violent relationship.

The CGP grappled with the tensions that many women experience between their rights and their society's cultural values.50 For instance, the specific gender-based analysis of the CGP meant that, in a diverse city like London, which is home to a number of different communities, some women who were unable to leave the family home were not able to take part in the CGP. Children and women from Orthodox Jewish families, for example, often continued to live in the same home with the perpetrator even after they had officially split up. This is likely to be true for a number of women and children from cultural or religious backgrounds where multiple generations may live together in one house, or where perpetrators had modified their behaviours through perpetrator programmes.51 Decisions to leave a family home are also dependent on structural constraints and possibilities. For example, in the UK, refuge spaces are under threat, and UKROL data suggests the England's refuge provision requires nearly 2,000 more spaces to meet Council of Europe Taskforce recommendations.52 This means that while some women fleeing violence will be able to secure safe accommodation in a shelter, others will have to seek out alternatives (e.g. friends or family members) if possible, or continue living with violence until other options become available.

Burman argues that services for children are often good on provision and protection but not on participation.53 While practices of children's participation have become more widespread in children's service provision across sectors in England, there has been a narrow focus on Article 12 of the UNCRC – and the elicitation of children's views in decisions that affect them – but less of a focus on trying to understand what matters to children beyond the confines of an institutional moment.54 More programmes like the CGP need to be offered to children and young people, and the needs of young people who witness or experience domestic violence should be prioritised and listened to.

Analyses of violence need to move beyond the current models that rest on essentialised ideas about men and women, and that ignore the multiplicity of experiences and factors that might lead someone to experience violence. Support needs to go beyond the reification of the idea that being violent (for men) and experiencing violence (for women) are ontological realities. Instead, analyses need to consider the contextual elements of violence that are situated in relation to power dynamics that include but are not limited to gender. Perpetrator and victim are not ontological positions, and should not be imagined as such. There are fathers who have experienced violence at the hands of female or male partners, and mothers who have experienced violence in the context of a lesbian partnership. While these people may only represent a minority of those in violent relationships, they are not unimportant. Equally, recent research in perpetrator programmes55 make clear that established interventions with violent men can lead to dramatic changes within relationships.

At the same time, further responses need to consider the complexities and challenges of 'intimate autonomy' and the complex dynamics of relating and separating.56 A US survey on women who had experienced domestic violence showed that while respondents from the 90 DV programmes surveyed reported their primary needs as being largely met by existing provision, they nevertheless had some key unmet needs, namely economic support and help for perpetrators of domestic violence.57 Women's concern for perpetrators is unsurprising given the complexities of intimate relationships, yet these concerns are rarely represented in research or practice. It has been suggested that the theoretical dominance of feminist and cognitive behavioural theories in framing research on domestic violence is partly responsible for such concerns being overlooked.58 In the CGP there was some recognition of the complexity of intimate family relationships. A repeated relational message in the training was that violence was a *response* to a situation and not a personal attribute ('dad is not a violent person, he reacted violently'). Such a message allows for the possibility of change and transformation to apply to all, including potentially the perpetrator of violence, and needs to be further embraced in the provision of services.

Responding to family violence emerged as a political project built on women's communities.59 We have argued that the CGP, and programmes like it, are emblematic of a crossroads in responses to domestic violence, an indication that the original political project is changing in response to social and cultural changes in how gender is understood and experienced. One of the analytical and practical challenges of carving up social problems in terms of demographic categories (young/old; male/female) and binary oppositions (victims/perpetrators) is that any gestalt between parts and wholes become severed. Haaken's analysis of the narratives that have framed the women's movement and the struggle to support women who have experienced domestic violence suggests a meaningful way of reintegrating parts and wholes. In her book, *Hard Knocks,* Haaken develops her arguments by engaging with the myths and counter-myths that have been historically employed to mobilise awareness and action against domestic violence. 'It takes two to tango' vs. 'men initiate ninety-five percent of incidents of couple violence' have for a long time framed knowledge of domestic violence. Original framings of women's experiences of domestic violence also largely ignored children.

Drawing on object-relations psychoanalytic thinking, Haaken argues that 'battered women have been valorized within feminism because they do bear – literally and symbolically – the collective injuries of women'.60 She goes on to explain that, while completely understandable, such idealisation results in denying women the 'full range of [their] humanity'.61 In other words, a 'battered woman' is not only positioned as a victim, but specific demands are placed on her victimhood in order for her to be a symbol that can mobilise collective action: she must, above all, be 'good' in order to be worthy of collective concern.

Haaken argues for the cultivation of a more 'depressive position' in response to domestic violence, a term that comes from a Kleinian object-relations school of thought and 'represents a movement beyond all-good and all-bad categories'. At the same time, recent feminist analyses of violence in other contexts have begun to reconceptualise violence as 'a dynamic relational process that produces docile bodies *and* complex intersectional subjectivities'.62 Such analyses of violence and intervention as the one presented in this chapter have the capacity to instigate a movement towards more integrated and inclusive ethical responses to social problems that cut across age, gender, sexuality, class, and culture. Such analyses would enable a more dynamic and fluid model of family violence – and responses to it – to emerge, one that would place oppression and hierarchy at the centre of an analysis of *contexts* that produce violence,63 moving past ontologically determined positions that rely on essentialist notions of age and gender alone.

#### NOTES

ed. (London: TSO, 2011); Holt, *Adolescent-to-Parent Violence;* Audrey Mullender and Rebecca Morley, eds, *Children Living With Domestic Violence: Putting Men's Abuse of Women on the Child Care Agenda* (London: Whiting & Birch, 1994); NICE, *Review of Interventions to Identify, Prevent, Reduce, and Respond to Domestic Violence* (London: NICE, 2013), https://www.nice. org.uk/guidance/ph50/resources/review-of-interventions-to-identify-prevent-reduce-andrespond-to-domestic-violence2; NICE, *Domestic Violence and Abuse [QA116],* (London: NICE, 2016), https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/qs116; Nicky Stanley, *Children Experiencing Domestic Violence: A Research Review* (Totnes: RIP, 2011), https://www.safeguardingchildrenbarnsley.com/media/15486/domestic\_violence\_signposts\_research\_in\_practice\_-\_july\_ 2012.pdf.

# 17 Becoming-woman, becoming-child *A joint political programme*

Ohad Zehavi

# Solidarity

What better way to take up the issue at stake – the politics of women and children – than with Shulamith Firestone's 1970 *The Dialectic of Sex*? Not only is it a groundbreaking work of feminist thinking, it should also be regarded as a true milestone in the history of the politics of childhood, if only for its fourth chapter, 'Down with Childhood', which is dedicated exclusively to this cause. In this remarkable chapter Firestone juxtaposes and interrelates, unflinchingly and unapologetically, the political predicaments of both women *and* children, and lays out a joint revolutionary manifesto, famously proclaiming that 'we must include the oppression of children in any program for feminist revolution'.1 Although Firestone is a common footnote in many essays concerned with the woman-andchild issue, her bold thought on the matter has generally not been thoroughly attended to, and insofar as it has been addressed it seems to have elicited rather negative responses.2 Laura Purdy, for instance, who does look into the details of Firestone's argument in her 1988 essay 'Does Women's Liberation Imply Children's Liberation?', bluntly concludes that 'Firestone's thesis is wrong'.3

I beg to differ. In fact, I think that in dismissing Firestone's claims and proving them 'wrong', Purdy completely misconstrues the nature of Firestone's argument. For while Purdy's reflections are all couched in a liberal rights discourse (as illustrated, for instance, by the title of another paper in which she rejects Firestone's stance, 'Why Children Shouldn't Have Equal Rights'),4 Firestone presents an incommensurably radical political view based on revolutionary Marxist thought, which undermines the very foundations of the common reflections on the proper way to treat children. It is therefore worthwhile to trace some of the basic tenets of Firestone's argument, and to appreciate its rhetorical force and vigour, before attending to her more discrete observations.

The polemical tone is set from the very start: 'Sex class is so deep as to be invisible.'5 Sex is not merely a biological phenomenon; it is rooted in class conflict and calls for a class analysis.  The aim of this analysis, and of this political programme, is not mere reforms that would ameliorate some superficial inequality (in fact, Firestone suggests that traditional categories of political thought would not apply to such an agenda, and could not be part of the solution for they are themselves part of the problem), but eradicating the class system – all class systems – altogether.7 This, for her, is the task of a revolutionary feminism:

[...] just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class *privilege* but of the economic class *distinction* itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be [...] not just the elimination of male *privilege* but of the sex *distinction* itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.8

Firestone's class analysis goes further than that. For, according to her, in contemporary society not only *sex* forms a class division, but so does *age*. This is a crucial link Firestone draws between femininity and childhood, one that must not be overlooked. Children, according to Firestone,9 are an oppressed group just like women: 'children of every class *are* lowerclass, just as women have always been'.10 This oppression is brought about not only by the vast segregation of children, primarily (but not exclusively) by means of the education system, but also by children's economic dependency, by their constant subjection to external authority and by their overall disenfranchisement. And, according to Firestone, just as mere reforms would not suffice in the sexual sphere, they would not do so in the realm of age either, for 'our final step must be the elimination of the very conditions of femininity and childhood themselves'.11 Firestone, who to a large extent bases her observations on childhood on Philippe Ariès's then recent and by now canonical account, draws from this historical analysis the crucial philosophical conclusion: that if 'childhood' is a mere contingency12 – a historical, social construct – then we can, in principle, do away with it.13 In other words, for Firestone both femininity and childhood are fabricated, constructed myths,14 and since both myths serve as bases for oppressive social regimes they both should – and could – be eradicated. As a result we would no longer recognise a person as man or woman, adult or child, thus 'clearing the way for a fully "human" condition'.15

This is the gist of Firestone's polemics: she asks us to harness the radical thinking about the politics of femininity for the sake of thinking radically about the politics of childhood. However, Firestone's work does not only propose a theoretical thesis, but in this very process performs a political act in its own right. By including in a pioneering book concerned with the political status of women a long and detailed chapter devoted to the analysis of the political status of children, Firestone performs, in what should be regarded as a veritable speech act,16 a keen performative gesture of solidarity with children.17 This is no accident. 'Few men', she says, 'show any interest in children. And certainly not enough to include them in any books on revolution'.18 It is up to feminist revolutionaries to do so, she says, so they would not miss an important substratum of oppression merely because it didn't directly concern them.19 If women are to eradicate the class system into which they are thrust, they must also eradicate all class systems, starting with the prevailing yet somewhat unapparent class system subjugating the young.

# Unschooling

Childhood is a myth. It is a contrived notion, historically produced and then 'naturalised' through various cultural practices and social institutions. And it is a class-forming myth, entailing daily acts of repression exerted on young people. Firestone wonders if the original myth, born in previous centuries, had not lost its force by the twentieth century, but concludes that on the contrary, its force had consistently grown and magnified.20 But hasn't this tendency seen a radical shift in recent decades, with the growing attention given to children and the advent of potentially liberating technologies? Perhaps the most convincing testament to the fact that it has not, and that what we have witnessed is just more of the 'pseudo-emancipation' Firestone already acknowledged almost fifty years ago, is the persistent reality of the school, an institution whose hold on the lives of young human beings seems to be stronger than ever.

The modern school is, in essence, a place of incarceration. Although it is clearly less violent and brutal than the prison, it could be seen as much harsher and much less legitimate, for two main reasons. First, because of the scale of imprisonment involved: compulsory education *is* 'the great confinement' *par excellence*, to paraphrase Foucault,21 who referred to the institutionalisation of the mad and other outcasts starting in the seventeenth century; it is a relentless and perpetual mass segregation and expulsion of the young from the rest of society. The second reason is that whereas the convicted criminal could be seen to have merited his or her imprisonment, the child is subject to a bitter physical detainment without any intrinsic justification: he or she is institutionalised due to the mere fact of being young of age, 'childness' being their only fault.