Introduction

The lived experiences of children and young people and the actualization of their political agency – whether individually or collectively – remain largely under-recognized within wider policy frameworks, especially those that attempt to systemically address the ongoing climate crisis. In terms of current global priorities, the climate crisis is placing children and young people at the centre of both policy and advocacy, and there are now multiple examples of political spaces within a context in which they can be seen to be an important part of ‘doing the work’ (see, for example, Byrne et al, 2019). This chapter examines this centrality within the context of education, specifically arguing that children and young people are increasingly advocating for a ‘critical climate justice praxis’, as coined by Sultana (2022: 119), that ‘demands systemic changes to address structural inequities and destabilize power systems that produce various climate injustices’. This is becoming more visible as a result of the political space that liberal institutions are allocating children and young people as moral authorities in addressing the climate crisis (Leggett, 2019) because they, and future generations, will be the ones witnessing its long-term impacts.

However, the demand for a climate justice praxis, and this moral positioning, clash with current educational frameworks for climate action in that, despite the widespread recognition by key stakeholders that critical climate justice education should involve radical critique, examination, and solutions, what currently exists is a framing that is neoliberal and colonial in nature. This chapter argues that alongside the very clear central role that children and young people play in climate action, what is required is a recognition that current frameworks of climate education are not, in fact, fit for the radical change that the climate crisis requires. Many of the education policies currently being promoted strip questions of justice, politics, and power from discussions of climate change and, in the end, deny children and young people the political space required to fully explore the causes and spectrum of responses to climate change. This is to say that the current policy environment sends a dual message that while children and young people are authorities in climate politics, they should not be given education that is critical of historical and enduring colonial and neoliberal structures, which remain the cause of the climate crisis.

Introduction

In recent years, unaccompanied children on the move have featured prominently in global politics, with significant implications for the children themselves, but also for the potential host countries. The number of firsttime child asylum applicants (both unaccompanied and with their families) in the EU rose from 64,330 in 2011 to 386,415 in 2016 (Eurostat, 2021). The number of unaccompanied child asylum applications in the EU also increased, from 11,690 in 2011 to 63,250 in 2016, with a 2015 peak of 95,205 unaccompanied children applying for asylum in the EU, including 3,255 in the UK (Eurostat, 2021b). In Europe in 2016, around one third (390,770) of asylum applications lodged were for children, with the UK receiving a relatively small number (9,200) of those applications compared to Germany, where two thirds (261,300) of the children applied (UNHCR et al, 2017). However, while in other European countries the 2015 peak has not been superseded, the UK saw higher numbers in 2019, when it received 3,755 asylum applications for unaccompanied children, suggesting that action to address these children’s needs remains significant there. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, numbers of unaccompanied child refugees once again began to rise in the UK, even more so in Poland and Germany.

Although the presence of independently migrating children is not an entirely new phenomenon, their increased presence has challenged accepted ideas about children and childhood held by policy makers. Moreover, the growing visibility of unaccompanied children and awareness of their specific needs pose significant questions for policy makers and wider host societies alike. This has been particularly notable in the UK, where questions of migration were politically leveraged throughout the Brexit decision process with significant implications for policy making and people’s everyday lives in the UK, Europe, and beyond.

During the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015–2016, public concerns relating to children on the move increased concurrently with major related political debates in Europe, including the Brexit vote in mid-2016 – a particularly prominent example of a broader political decision widely linked to ideas about immigration. Drawing on data gathered through a wider study considering political representations of young people on the move, in this chapter we consider the particular salience of representations of unaccompanied children, who are often highlighted as the children seen as most at risk or causing most concern.

Introduction

The Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 stunned the world with its brutal, targeted violence against civilians. Systematic war crimes by the Russian military have not spared children, who featured prominently as objects of violence in global media coverage (Falk, 2022). As children have been killed, trafficked, wounded, and maimed, this vulnerable group also comprises significant portions of the worst refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) crisis in Europe since World War II (Vierlinger, 2022). While many analysts trace how Russia’s war against Ukraine is fundamentally changing the global geopolitical order, we note that this war is likewise profoundly shaping the youngest generation of Europe’s largest country in ways that are still unfolding.

However, as we explore in this chapter, children’s intersections and interactions with this war and its resultant militarism began nearly a decade ago. Although the current escalation has intensified the themes we explore in this chapter, we have elected to restrict our focus to 2014–2022 to explore how these latent realities shaped Ukrainian children and young adults today – including Ukraine’s youngest soldiers who were in elementary school when this war began. The current war began when the Russian Federation annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and sparked armed conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Under the pretext of a separatist conflict, the Russian government funnelled military, financial, and political support to proxy forces, leading to protracted conflict that received muted global attention (Dunn and Bobick, 2014; Galeotti, 2016; Government of the Netherlands, 2018; Marten, 2019; Hook, 2020; Troianovski, 2021).

Even before February 2022, the United Nations estimated that at least 14,000 lives had been lost, 1.6 million IDPs driven from their homes, and approximately 30,000 people wounded (International Crisis Group [ICG], 2022). In 2020, the United Nations Children’s Agency, UNICEF, estimated that the war had ‘deeply affected’ 580,000 children near the eastern frontlines and in areas controlled by Russia’s proxy forces, with 200,000 children requiring urgent psychosocial support, another 200,000 driven from their homes, and a fifth of conflict zone schools damaged by kinetic violence like shelling, causing widespread disruption of education (UNICEF, 2020).

Introduction

Under what is known as the girling of development (Hayhurst, 2011), girls have received unprecedented attention as global activists and empowered figures uniquely capable of addressing our world’s most urgent crises. Early iterations of these programmes in the 1990s and early 2000s, such as Nike’s Girl Effect and the World Bank’s Adolescent Girl Initiative, focused on girls’ unique capacity to end global poverty. Increasingly, however, girls are being called upon to save our planet from climate change. Girl Rising (GR), a US-based ‘girl’s education non-profit’, has launched the Future Rising (FR) programme, described as ‘a virtual fellowship for young activists working on environmental justice storytelling with a focus on women and girls’ (Girl Rising, nd.c). FR fellows are to create a ‘body of knowledge about how the drivers and impacts of climate change intersect with girls’ education and gender equity’ (Girl Rising, nd.b). Although many of the inaugural fellows’ projects address the intersectional and global inequities of climate change, the FR programme itself – especially its promotional material and crafted lesson plans available to interested Global North teachers – remains committed to GR’s broader liberal emphasis on individual educational investment to not only improve the life trajectories of Global South girls but also to address a broad array of grave social crises. As GR boldly claims, the ‘future of our planet depends on investing in quality education for girls’ (Girl Rising, nd.b).

FR is an example of girl power environmentalism: an individualistic, colonial, and capitalist version of (Southern) girls’ personal responsibility for global planetary problems. Here, girls – because they are girls – possess a unique girl power waiting to be tapped into by Global North educational intervention and green employment initiatives. Under this thinking, girl power is all we need to address the climate crisis. Using what I refer to as decolonial feminism – a theoretical framework that encompasses Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-imperial feminist theorizing (Lugones, 2010; de Finney, 2014; Datta, 2015) – this chapter illuminates how FR constructs a limited, colonial, and capitalist version of girlhood informed by girl power environmentalism, one that works to conceal the variegated ways in which girls always already exist as political subjects in the world.

Introduction

From 1980 to 2000, Peru experienced an internal armed conflict between the Peruvian state, the Communist Party of Peru–Shining Path (PCP-SL), the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), and others. After the resignation of Alberto Fujimori in 2000 as president of Peru due to corruption charges, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PTRC) was created by the transitional government of interim President Valentin Paniagua in 2001, with the mandate to research the causes of the conflict and the human rights violations. The PTRC was seen as part of an exemplary transitional justice case to reach a successful transition to democracy (Boesten, 2014). From 2001 to 2003, the PTRC gathered 16,986 testimonies to produce the Final Report. The PTRC relied heavily on the testimonies gathered as the emphasis was placed on victims’ narrated experiences about the conflict, and the work done for the chapter on sexual violence against women was no exception. The PTRC Final Report acknowledged that the state forces were the foremost perpetrators of sexual violence, and in doing so, it recognized that several children born of violence were born after assaults. These children were mentioned in the Final Report, public hearings, and the data gathered and produced by the PTRC as ‘abandoned children’, ‘children without a father’, ‘soldiers’ children’, or the ‘product of rape’.

Stories about children born of violence have emerged in post-conflict Peru. These stories provide alternative accounts of children born of violence that counter the promoted version of the PTRC conflict memory. The counter-narratives can be found within the realm of the PTRC in interviews, testimonies, birth certificates, and all the material gathered and produced by the PTRC that is kept in the archive and the realm of popular culture. The counter-narratives about children born of violence challenge the promoted narratives on sexual violence against women by the PTRC, in which children born of violence were portrayed as evidence to demonstrate their mother’s rape. The counter-narratives situate several narratives, but in general terms, they display that children’s identities are continuously constructed and contested in Peru nowadays.

In this chapter, the analysis of the stories about children born of violence as counter-narratives reminds us of the existence of children born of violence as more than just channels to reflect on the trauma of war, as has been suggested in the literature on children born of war (Carpenter, 2007, 2010; Seto, 2013).

Introduction

On 23 November 2015, Wajih Awad, a 14-year-old from the Qalandiya refugee camp and her 16-year-old cousin Norhin Awad, entered West Jerusalem Mahane Yehuda market armed with scissors, with the intent to stab Israeli civilians. Wajih lightly wounded an elderly man and attempted to stab another civilian before the girls were both shot by an Israeli security officer. Wajih Awad was killed after being knocked on the ground by a passerby and then shot at point blank range by a security officer. Her cousin recovered from two bullet wounds in her stomach and is serving a 13-year prison sentence in Israel. Wajih, the 14-year-old ‘terrorist’, was apparently seeking revenge for the death of her brother, who was killed by Israeli soldiers after being shot at close range with a rubber bullet to the neck while protesting at a checkpoint. Her 16-year-old cousin claimed that she was accompanying her and did not intend to hurt anyone. Armed with scissors, these girls did not pose a serious threat; only the one man was slightly injured. However, within Israel, the shooting of the girls was considered fully justifiable. The attack by the teens was not an isolated case but was rather one of hundreds of incidents involving Palestinian youth seeking revenge against Israeli civilians subsequent to the 2014 Gaza war and ongoing realities of life under the military occupation. Because so many of the incidents were perpetuated by Palestinian youth lightly armed with scissors, screwdrivers, or knives, the wave of violence during 2015–2016 has often been referred to as the ‘knife’ or the ‘children’s intifada’.

Within an internal violent conflict where civilians are not far removed from combatants, children may engage as activists or perpetrators of violent acts, and they can volunteer or be coerced into conducting suicide missions. Although there is much literature on children’s vulnerability regarding the effects of war and exploitation (Slone and Mann, 2016; Wessells, 2019), there is far less research into children as perpetrators of violence. Most of the research on children as violent perpetrators has focused on child soldiers abducted and trained by armed groups. Recent research has noted that modern armed conflict has increased the use of child soldiers (Nyamutata, 2020). Violent groups have practical reasons for targeting children for terrorist activities, which include attaining cheap soldiers and increasing the longevity of the groups.

Introduction

‘Children shape global politics’, reflected Lee-Koo (2020: 22). This chapter explains how different representations of migrant children shape global migration politics. In the last decade, children became more visible in migration/refugee studies. Different categories of migrant children, including unaccompanied children (those that cross an international border alone), separated children (those that cross an international border accompanied by an adult that is not their legal guardian), and children left behind (those that remain in their origin countries when their caretakers migrate), were employed to study the movement of children across borders.

Children, generally defined as people under 18 years old in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), have rights independently of their migration status (right to non-discrimination – Article 2). The Convention also guarantees children’s specific rights connected to migration, such as the right not to be separated from their family (Article 9), the right to have their best interests as a primary consideration (Article 3), the right to family reunification (‘family reunification shall be dealt with by States Parties in a positive, humane and expeditious manner’ – Article 10), and the right to asylum (Article 22). Besides that, human rights courts, including the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, have employed the UNCRC in cases involving children to recognize and guarantee their rights.

In a nutshell, international law obliges states to guarantee child migrants’ rights which could mean that the general concept of children (as rights holders) could restrain conservative migration politics. Since children are an internationally protected group and children traditionally perceived as innocent victims that deserve protection (Josefsson, 2017b), states willing to stop the entrance and permanence of child migrants in their territories have to adopt discursive strategies to justify the denial of child migrants’ rights. Lind (2019: 337) explains that ‘children’s rights are increasingly mobilised for governing and controlling, rather than enabling, vulnerabilised migrant children’s territorial presence and mobility’.

In recent years, with the increasing number of children migrating alone, politicians and researchers have started to understand that children are decision-makers in their migration processes and have agency in migration (Bhabha, 2014), which has motivated discourses focusing on child migration.

The previous chapter ended with a quotation by Charles Loring Brace from 1880, in which he affirmed that the best way to govern the ‘dangerous classes’ was ‘not to punish them, but to prevent their growth’ (1880: i–ii). This was the logical conclusion based on deterministic arguments that prevailed in the early stages of positivist criminology, as informed by conceptions of degeneration and atavism. ‘Preventing the growth’ of dangerous others clearly alludes to eugenic policies, which, as we shall see, were extremely pervasive in the period covered in this chapter. But if we continue to read Brace’s argument, we find that he also points to an additional strategy – that of socializing, reforming, educating, and generally bettering the underdeveloped portion of the citizenry through moralistic campaigns:

Such policies, to be sure, were also common and indicative of the era. I refer to this disciplinary and reformative logic as modernization theory.

It is between these two logics, eugenics and modernization, that this chapter travels. In terms of wider history, we are now in what is known as the Progressive Era – the period from roughly 1890 to 1930, which was considered an era of reform, particularly in the United States. In criminological texts, this period is often divided into two, represented by their leading schools of thought: first the neo-Lombrosian era, defined by multifactor explanations of crime, and then the Chicago School, which argued for social causes of delinquency, starting with social ecology theory. As we shall see, there are major differences between the neo-Lombrosian and Chicago School paradigms. Yet these two schools of thought share the fundamental premises of positivist criminology: the ‘otherness’ of the offender, based on some form of pathology, and therefore the need for specialized knowledge to control and manage this population.

The positivist school in criminology came to define the field for a century, or more. Indeed, even today, it is almost redundant to use the word ‘positivist’ before ‘criminology’; criminology means positivist criminology to most people. Historically, the advent of the positivist school marked a new paradigm for thinking and producing knowledge about delinquency, crime, and penology. It represented a new way of defining social problems and social solutions, motivated by a cluster of emerging social challenges for governmentality: namely, how to administer, control, and regulate populations as the appalling poverty begot by the Industrial Revolution – ‘the ugliest world in which man has ever lived’ (Hobsbawm, 1996: 298) – became incontrovertible.

The positivist school was part of a greater movement of already existing social activism and scholarly work that came to answer dual and competing objectives: to preserve and justify the social system that produced these horrific social conditions, and the positions of those who enjoyed its fruits, while at the same time maintaining an adherence to Enlightenment ideals such as equality and human dignity. The ‘solution’, if one can call it that, was found in degeneration theories: yes, all men are in theory created equal, but some are in fact created less equal than others, subject to some form of physical or social pathology which made them incapable of adopting a normative social life. The problem, in other words, lay not in the system, but in the individuals whose social degradation was seen as both symptom and signifier. This ‘solution’ can be defined as an ideology of otherness, combining universalism and exclusion. Otherness means that universal ideals do stand, but for some, their otherness excludes them from the rule. Given their pathology, these individuals cannot be party in the regular sense to the social contract, as held by the classical thinkers; instead, they need special treatment; and if they cannot be reformed, then they must somehow be excluded. This new understanding also marks the transition from sovereignty to discipline, in Foucault’s (2007) terms (briefly discussed at the end of the previous chapter).

In short, the positivist school rose to dominance as the leading paradigm for criminological knowledge production in the late nineteenth century, the ‘age of degeneration’ (Valverde, 2017a: 336), a doctrine shared by many of the social elites of the time.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the production of criminological knowledge, as it transitioned out of the neo-Lombrosian era to the growing dominance of the Chicago School, maintained the foundational idea of pathology, the epicentre of otherness. Some sort of pathology, it was assumed, leads to – or at least increases a tendency toward – criminal behaviour. Put differently, the existence of some pathology differentiated offenders, considered to be deviant, from non-offenders. Mainstream positivist criminology, at that time, focused on the study of delinquent behaviour at the individual level, as opposed to the study of the criminal act and its jurisprudence, as in the classical school (Jeffery, 1959: 9). Individual criminality had been the focus of positivist criminology since the time of Lombroso or even before, and it would continue to guide the work of the scholars covered in this chapter. What had changed, as we already saw in the previous chapter, was the location of the individual pathology from internal to external: from something that could be found within the human body to something that originates in the social body. What remained constant for the aetiological positivist school in criminology was its focus on the question ‘Why do (some) people break the law?’, along with its motivation: to improve social control (Cohen, 1969: 14).

As we know, it was Garland who first asserted that positivist criminology is the criminology of the other. The conceptualization of otherness discussed here, as we have already observed from analysing the work of Charles Goring and the early days of the Chicago School, entails a difference not in kind, but in degree only. This conviction deepened with modernization theory, as it advanced a cultural understanding of deviant behaviour. Accordingly, this difference was the result of a cultural lag, to use C. Wright Mills’ term (1943: 176), or cultural– historical atavism, if you will – meaning that the deviant other is stuck in an earlier cultural evolutionary stage, with the extent of the gap represented by the degree of their degeneration (or, as it was later termed, their disorganization or strain). Yet this softer deterministic pathology of the criminal other also means that the other is receptive to correction, opening the door to different kinds of interventions.

Criminology and penology, as realms of knowledge, are at the heart of the human condition, and crucial for the understanding of people as social beings. This was true when knowledge of sin and its punishment was advanced through theological language – think about the first stories of the Old Testament – and remained true when it took the form of scientific knowledge. This knowledge plays a pivotal role, albeit not an exclusive one, in shaping regimes of social control. It provides a conceptual framework as well as vital legitimacy for social organization and governance, essential for setting norms and rules, articulating epistemes for human behaviour and action, and devising justifiable sanctions and use of violence against those who are regarded as posing a threat or violating the public peace. Moreover, criminological knowledge, which is diverse and ever-evolving, has played a key role in absorbing, reflecting, reacting to, and shaping the great transformations of modernity.

It is thus rather surprising that such a pivotal realm of knowledge has not received much reflexive and historical attention. Indeed, relatively little has been written on the history of criminology (Rafter: 2011: 143). But, as Nicole Rafter commented, ‘If criminology is to fully mature as a field of study, it needs to develop a clear sense of its own history’ (2004: 736). Recent scholarship is starting to fill this gap – see, for example, ‘New directions in the history of criminology’, written by Richard Wetzell (2017), and David Churchill, Henry Yeomans and Iain Channing’s Historical Criminology (2021), which also offers a good review of prior works. Still, there have been relatively few macro introspective reflections about the state, nature, and meaning of criminological thought. In this respect, prominent voices within criminology, across a spectrum of analytical orientations, have expressed frustration at the field’s limited historical analysis and self-examination, and have called for more scholarly work (see, inter alia, Nelken, 1994; Braithwaite, 2000; Savelsberg and Sampson, 2002; Laub, 2004; Weisburd and Piquero, 2008; Bursik, 2009; Hagan, 2010; Cullen, 2011).

This book aims to advance an introspective account of the state of the field of Western criminology, centring on the production of criminological knowledge since the classical school, especially as it developed over the last century in the United States.

As we saw in Chapter 2, the classical school in criminology came out of the Enlightenment, and by the late nineteenth century it had been superseded by the positivist school. By the late 1960s, and even slightly before, classical criminology was making a comeback – or at least, a comeback in criminological knowledge production, though not with respect to its influence on penal jurisprudence and the criminal justice system, which never discontinued. Interestingly, this resurgence of classical thought and influences – as we discussed, for example, with respect to David Matza’s work – guided a growing body of criminological research that sat more comfortably on the political right (specifically, the law-and-order doctrine and liberal political economy). In this chapter, we shall see how such research led to neoclassical theories and a growing orientation toward administrative criminology. This body of work challenged positivist criminology insofar as it reinstated the idea of offenders as rational actors, scaling down the idea of delinquent pathology. This developing paradigm in criminological knowledge production also pointed to growing reservations about the tireless positivist effort to explain the causes of criminality, and instead promoted operational research to improve efficiency in the criminal justice system.

This chapter focuses on this paradigmatic shift, which I call the managerial movement; it is also referred to as the effectiveness movement (Clear, 2010: 3). This movement, which has been dominant in the field of criminology since the 1970s, has placed scholarly priority on the relevance and optimization of policy. More precisely, in contrast with the positivist– aetiological school’s insistence on explaining crime, for the managerial movement crime is a given: it does not need to be explained, only to be managed. As a result, the orientation of criminological research shifted toward meeting specific quantifiable objectives in the form of pragmatic evidence-based research (‘What works?’). To quote James Q. Wilson, one of the luminaries of the managerial movement:

The objective of this book has been to contribute a reflexive analysis of modern Western criminology, focusing on knowledge production rather than criminological and penal policy. More precisely, I have aimed to reconstruct the ideology – as ‘science’ of otherness – as a principal theme in the history of knowledge production in Western criminological thought. Throughout the book, I have discussed different versions of otherness that have served as ideological points of departure for various schools of thought and paradigms in the field, and explored the co-constitutive evolution of knowledge production in modern criminology and ideological variants of otherness in relation to the socio-historical context. As such, while this book did not intend – and indeed, could not have tried – to capture the full rich, layered body of criminological knowledge, I believe it does have something to say about the essence of the field.

This book has reread the history of Western criminology, not as mere knowledge that aims to explain criminal behaviour based on quantifiable methods, or even to perfect criminal jurisprudence and practices, but also as an apparatus to inscribe, reproduce, and legitimize a certain social structure. Arguably, in this respect criminology is no different from any other discipline in the social sciences. Yet without going into comparisons, we should acknowledge the often purposeful direction of criminological knowledge as applied knowledge (‘science for life’s sake’, as Ferri wrote (2004 [1901]: 35)). As such, its ideological foundations play a significant function as an instrument of power.

Lest we despair, I end this chapter by pointing to a growing body of work that offers a promising alternative direction for knowledge production in criminology. First, though, let us briefly look back, and summarize how we have got to where we are.

A science of otherness: summary and recapitulation

In developing a theory of knowledge based on the concept of otherness, this book has extended David Matza and David Garland’s depiction of positivist criminology as constructed from ideas of difference and pathology (Matza, 1964) and as a ‘criminology of the other’ (Garland, 1996, 1999, 2001). The ideology of otherness asserts a discourse of responsibilization in which the fault for social unrest lies with some problematic ‘other’ rather than with the social structure and its hierarchies.