Coetzee's texts illustrate the instrumentalism with which the discourse of humanitarianism produces women and non-human animals as necessarily vulnerable. South Africa's TRC, I suggest in this chapter, is analogously complicit in producing children as instruments of post-apartheid nation-building. This instrumentalism is occluded in a spectacular narrativization of youth that produces them simultaneously as helpless and innocent victims of the apartheid state and as subjects all the more remarkable for the agency they express in their participation in the anti-apartheid struggle. The spectacular rendition of children as helpless victims, as we shall see, predates the TRC. Texts of the apartheid struggle render children and adolescents instrumental to adult visions, highlighting the fact that the spectacular conceptualization of youth as victims occludes the manipulation of the figure of the child as having no agency to suit adult ends. Further, it fails to account for youth themselves as perpetrators of violence. The trope of the always innocent child, then, prevents us from developing a sense of the intergenerational challenges faced by youth growing up under conditions of extreme pressure, fraught with violence.

Here I examine the discursive underpinnings of the language we use to explain the specific vulnerability of children; and how the linguistic conventions of these aetiologies may work against, rather than in the interests of, children, adolescents, and adults living with a history of childhoods that have been devastated by political violence, poverty, and abuse.