The Children’s Society is a UK-based charity that is “committed to helping vulnerable and disadvantaged young people, including safeguarding children in care and young runaways”. The Children’s Society campaigns and research seek to influence policy on and give voice to marginalized children, including young refugees. In February, they released a report on the state of young refugees and migrants in the UK. From the announcement:

In “I don’t feel human”, we examine available data on the extent and impact of destitution, and speak to young migrants and the people who work to support them. The report sets out the devastating impact being destitute has on children, young people and families.

“This is an issue for young people who come to seek protection in the UK alone but have been refused asylum and so are left in limbo.

“Having fled danger in their country of birth, these young people are exposed to danger and harm in this country because they are excluded from support and accommodation. They remain hidden from view and have to survive with minimal resources.

“This is also an issue for children in migrant families who may not have an asylum claim but who become destitute for various reasons including domestic violence and family breakdown. Yet due to immigration restrictions they are unable to access support and their parents are not allowed to work in order to pull them out of poverty”.

As posted on the NAME listserv:

Age assessment awareness and working with age-disputed young people

February 21, 2012 & March 15, 2012.  Ensuring the wellbeing of unaccompanied refugee children and young people is at the heart of this course, which aims to give delegates the confidence and information they need to challenge assessments, and the tools to ensure that the correct processes are in place in your organisation.

An introduction to working with unaccompanied children

February 28, 2012.  This course will provide an overview of the asylum and support systems for children and examine the interaction between the two. Focusing on procedures that the young people are required to participate in, delegates are assisted in exploring how best to respond to the difficulties they may be facing.

Emotional wellbeing of refugee children and young people

March 1, 2012. This course will examine the emotional impact of the experiences that refugee children and young people face as they flee from their home countries and settle in the UK.  It will provide participants with the tools to assess the organisation in which they work, to identify factors which are detrimental to emotional wellbeing and to devise strategies for providing appropriate care and support.

Working with refugee children in schools

March 1, 2012. This course will provide an opportunity to examine the specific needs of refugee pupils, including those new to schooling in the UK, and investigate positive strategies to support them in achieving their potential.  Participants will have the opportunity to reflect on and evaluate their own practice, as well as that of the school in which they work.

All courses cost £109 for registered charities and £175 for all other attendees.  To book, email training@refugeecouncil.org.uk

Launching now is an International Detention Coalition (IDC) campaign to stop the detention of children. Children do not belong in detention. The IDC is urgently reaching out now to all IDC members and friends, but also to refugee networks, child rights organisations and other human rights workers to make a commitment to endorse our campaign prior to the international launch in March at the UN Human Rights Council.

The IDC wants to be able to give strength to the campaign on the launch date by making a statement about the number of organisations from a number of countries support the campaign. Please read the endorsement letter below, and either fill out the embedded form.

Please share the information below widely amongst your networks – don’t forget, the IDC wants general child rights and human rights organisations to get involved too! See the campaign endorsement video.

Call for support: Global campaign to end the immigration detention of children

The International Detention Coalition (IDC) will launch a global campaign to end the immigration detention of children at the UN Human Rights Council in March this year as well as in a number of countries. IDC needs your support to build and put pressure on governments to start using child friendly procedures, or for those that already do, we need to ask them to share good practices with others. The campaign to end child detention will be open to anyone supporting this position, as laid out in a policy document on child detention based on research in five continents wherein almost 80 formerly detained children were interviewed. The central argument not to detain children, their families and unaccompanied or separated minors is based on three principles:

1. Undocumented child migrants are, first and foremost, children

2. The best interests of the child must be a primary consideration in any action taken in relation to the child

3. The liberty of the child is a fundamental human right.

This campaign then is about child rights but equally about human rights and refugee rights. This campaign focuses specifically on children detained for immigration purposes, including child refugees, asylum seekers and irregular migrants, however the IDC vision of alternatives to detention is far broader. IDC is looking for organisations to support the campaign in a number of ways: – IDC will organize a side event at the UN Human Rights Council in March 2012 to present the child focused research at a panel discussion on child detention. Also on that day, the official campaign film clip and website will be launched publicly and a number of countries will engage media with formerly detained children or by other means.

Let IDC know if you can help. – IDC also needs help with collecting more written or recorded stories, data about child detention or good practices in various countries, campaign representatives at regional and international forums and more. – IDC is looking for partners who are willing to endorse the campaign with their ongoing national or international work or directly participate in campaign activities. The alliance will be broader than just IDC members and open to everyone who can adhere to their position. Please visit the IDC website for more information on endorsement or contact Jeroen Van Hove, the campaign coordinator at jvanhove@idcoalition.org.

Global Studies of Childhood Volume 1 Number 4, Special Issue: Childhood in Literature, Media and Popular Culture with guest editors Ummni Khan and Sue Saltmarsh includes the following:

The Case of Children’s Literature: Colonial or anti-colonial? Lucy Hopkins.

The Visual Poetics of Play: childhood in three Canadian graphic novels by Ummni Khan.

Prostituted Girls and the Grown-up Gaze Sue Saltmarsh & Anna North.

Christopher Drew. The Spirit of Australia: learning about Australian childhoods in Qantas commercials Kristina Gottschall.

Writing Identity: gendered values and user content creation in SNS interaction among Estonian and Swedish tweens Alexander Tymczuk.

Social Orphans and Care at a Distance: popular representations of childhood in Ukrainian transnational families COLLOQUIUM Stephanie Pearson.

From the Global Studies of Childhood (GSC) site: “GSC is a peer-reviewed, internationally focused, online research journal. The journal provides an opportunity for researchers, university and college students and professionals who are interested in issues associated with childhood in education, family, and community contexts from a global perspective to present, share and discuss their work. GSC aims to present opportunities for scholars and emerging researchers to interrogate the ways in which globalization and new global perspectives impact on children’s life experiences.

“Global Studies of Childhood is a space for research and discussion about issues that pertain to children in a world context, and in contemporary times the impact of global imperatives on the lives of children has been significant. Experiences of childhood that take place within the situated spaces of geographic locales and culturally specific frames of reference are subject to global forces that complicate, disrupt and reconfigure the meanings associated with childhood/s on the local and global stage”.

From the H-CHILDHOOD@H-NET.MSU.EDU listserv:

“CFP: AEGIS Thematic Workshop: Children & Migration in Africa: an Interdisciplinary Perspective In association with the Centre of African Studies (SOAS, University of London); the Institute of Historical Research (University of London); and Institut des Sciences Humaines (University of Liège – Belgium).

“While African children are heavily involved in migration, they remain obscure in scholarly literatures dominated by the male labour migratory model. Furthermore, work on young migrants often conflates the social categories of ‘child’ and ‘youth’ and children themselves are divided into the binary states of agents or victims.  Although recent scholarship on children and migration in Africa has acknowledged the importance of African children as discrete agents in migratory processes, analytical shortcomings remain. Much of this research has lacked a longue durée perspective.

“The key aim of this workshop will be to connect contemporary and historical analysis of the migratory trajectories of children in several African societies.  Papers could address, but are not limited to, the following issues: patterns of fosterage; child circulation within Africa and between Africa and Europe; the role of education; child labour; and conceptions of place and ‘home’.  The workshop will take place at SOAS (University of London) on 24-25 May 2012. There is a ceiling of 20 participants and limited funding, with priority for Graduate Students and African Scholars.

“Interested scholars should send us an abstract in English (max. 300 words) and a short bio (max. 250 words) by 29 January 2012. Postgraduate and recent PhD graduates are particularly encouraged to send in proposals. Papers will be pre-circulated among the participants and need to be submitted by 29 April 2012. Selected papers will be published in a peer-reviewed edited volume”.

Contact Info: mr28@soas.ac.ukJack | jl79@soas.ac.ukElodie | elodie.razy@ulg.ac.be

An Investigation of the Career Paths of Internationally Trained Early Childhood Educators Transitioning into Early Learning Programs (PDF) conducted by Shelly Mehta, Zeenat Janmohamed, and Carl Corter, the Atkinson Centre for Society and Child Development.

Some background (taken from the report):

“In 2006, the Association of Early Childhood Educators of Ontario in partnership with Thorncliffe Neighbourhood Office and the School of Early Childhood at George Brown College established the Access to Early Childhood Education program (referred to as the ECE Bridging Program) to address the need to bridge internationally trained early childhood educators into the Canadian workforce and to rectify the labour force shortage in the early childhood sector. During the second phase of the project, additional funding was secured expanding the project’s capacity by providing direct services in two identified high need immigrant communities in Hamilton and Ottawa. The project added Alqonguin College, Mohawk College and Hamilton’s Affiliated Services for Children and Youth to its partnership roster. In the last decade there have been an increasing number of internationally trained educators seeking early childhood equivalency in Ontario (AECEO 2011). Despite a wide variety of education credentials and professional experience, like other immigrants, early childhood educators with international training are not recognized by employers for their knowledge and expertise. As a result, the ECE Bridging Program was developed to provide an opportunity to combine international education with relevant early childhood courses in Ontario that would lead to ECE credential equivalency”.

This research examines the pathway to employment in the field of early childhood education (ECE) for internationally trained practitioners and the experiences of internationally trained professionals in the ECE Bridging Program.

A call for papers from La Revue d’histoire de l’enfance “irrégulière” est spécialisée dans le champ de l’enfance et de la jeunesse marginales ou marginalisées/Journal of the History of “irregular” Childhood is a scholarly, peer reviewed journal focused on the history of marginalized childhood and youth.

(Dis)placed childhoods. Forced migrations and youth welfare policies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Edited by David Niget and Mathias Gardet.

From the call (posted on H-NET List for History of Childhood and Youth) “Most of the young people placed in institutions under child welfare policies were in fact displaced or imigrated. Authorities and philanthropic societies have, over the past two centuries, proceeded to displace tens of thousands of children: they were separated from families who were deemed to be corrupting, kept away from their neighbourhoods and from socialising with criminals, moved away from towns and cities to fulfill a recurring dream of reversing rural exodus,which was at first only a fantasy and which then became more and more real.

“But some children were displaced in a more systematic and planned way, not only in order to distance them from their homes, but also just to establish them elsewhere. Thus, some policies implemented a deliberate and thorough going programme of mass displacement of juvenile populations, often beyond national borders, in accordance with colonial objectives, specific political situations. These programmes can be correlated to wars and regime changes, educational and ideological utopias or specific institutional strategies. Therefore, the justification for the removal of the children from their home environment was either to punish them or to establish a utopia.

“Biopolitical issues have emerged: Was it about removing bad influences from the State or about regenerating the nation by transplanting its offspring in a healthy and promising substratum? In the name of the imperialism or colonisation, children from working-class English families were sent to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and therefore not merely the result of a political situation, or of chance selection of the most vulnerable victims. From the 19th to the 20th century, migration became a tool for the political management of populations, of which childhood is emblematic.

“This colourful but little known history raises questions for any historian:

“What is the relationship between biopolitics and childhood? How does the increasing concern to pursue a population policy, with the future planning and management of human resources of contemporary societies in mind, lead to the formulation of childhood policies within the ambit of demographics, and more specifically the control of migration flows? How do humanitarian organisations become involved with these policies?

“What is the status of childhood within the creation of State policies? From the citizen to the ‘new man’, how does childhood and youth become interpreted into political meaning and absorbed into the heart of the nation? What about the notion of the Empire and child exploitation within this colonial enterprise?

“How are gender, class and ethnicity analysed within these questions relating to migrpopulating? In the colonial enterprise, is the displacementof young orphans from cities to Africa an attempt to ‘whiten’ the colonies, or to perpetuate, with regard to Canada, Australia or New Zealand, ethnically homogenous colonies? What about acculturation goals reflected by the displacement of indigenous children?

“What organisations did support these displacements? Displacement policies, exclusive from the State, also resulted from the intervention of private, philanthropic and religious or political parties. What kindof devices did these displacement policies put in place? What kind of institutions? Were they open, closed, educational or punitive? Did they involve institutional violence and did they include compensation policies in recent years?

“What expertise was involved in this undertaking? Were demographic and economic reasons used? What was the role of social work in the identification of those to be displaced? Were medicine and psychoanalytic methods used to select young people?”.

Deadline for submissions is October 31, 2011. For more information, contact david.niget@uclouvain.be

Ten new documents on children on the move and migration have been added to the digital library of the Childtrafficking.com website. Here are just two, as described in a posting on the Childtrafficking listserv:

“Global Movement for Children. (2010). Leaving Home: Voices of Children on the Move. 15 p. The report denounces the invisibility of children within international debates and immigration policies on the issue as well as the lack of adequate policies to address their specific needs. It voices their experiences on having left their homes and it analyses the wide array of causes and consequences that migration has for children beyond those who have been victims of criminal activities.”

“Global Movement for Children. (2010). Protecting and Supporting Children on the Move. 37 p. The International Conference on Protecting and Supporting Children on the Move was held in Barcelona on 5-7 October 2010. It aimed at analysing and debating the current status of the issue of children on the move and presenting some key recommendations on the way forward to initiating the revision of policy and programmatic responses to the protection and support of these children. The Conference Report is expected to be a road map for topics of debate initiated at the Barcelona meetingwith a view to building national and international work agendas”.

Childtrafficking.com welcomes comments and suggestions and are interested to receive documents and research from the field. Contact childtrafficking.com@gmail.com.

The Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) and the Institute for Gender and Development Studies: The Nita Barrow Unit, University of the West Indies are hosting an international conference on: Mothers and Mothering in a Global Context, Feb 24-25, 2012 in Barbados.

From their call for papers:

“This conference explores motherhood and mothering in a global context by highlighting the commonality and also the diversity in how mothers care for children and others across, and beyond, borders and cultures. We welcome submissions from researchers, students, activists, community workers, artists and writers and papers that explore the meaning and experience of motherhood in a global context from all academic disciplines including but not limited to motherhood studies, anthropology, history, literature, popular culture, women’s studies, sociology, and that consider the theme across a wide range of maternal identities including racial, ethnic, regional, religious, national, social, cultural, political, and sexual. Cross-cultural perspectives on the subject matter are particularly welcome.

Deadline for submissions is Nov 15, 2011. For more information, visit the MIRCI website.

Child Rights International Network (CRIN) has launched today a child rights wiki. From their announcement:

“Today, CRIN is launching a “Children’s Rights Wiki” to bring together all information about children’s rights in one place. The aim of the project – which is in the style of a Wikipedia – is to make the large volume of information that exists on children’s rights more accessible, to highlight persistent violations and inspire collective action. Much of the information in the new Wiki is already available on the CRIN website.

“See the Wiki here: Initially the Wiki is beginning with 41 country pages, with more to follow. They are:

Afghanistan, Angola, Argentina, Bahrain, Belarus, Belgium, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, Grenada, Guatemala, Japan, Lao, Macedonia, Yogoslav Republic, Mongolia, Montenegro, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Serbia, Singapore, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikstan, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Yemen”.

The Wiki is a web-based, multi-lingual and interactive project – CRIN welcomes comments or suggestions to info@crin.org.