Abstract
The paper seeks to analyze children’s bodily vulnerability as grounded in generational order. The thesis is put forward, that the generational order is embodied via body techniques of vulnerability, deployed both by adults and children. In presenting results from research on professional responses to child maltreatment and neglect, three sets of age related body techniques of vulnerability are identified, concerning caregivers, professionals and the children itself.
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Notes
A 3-year study including interviews with professionals involved in decision making processes on as well as interventions in possible cases of child maltreatment and neglect, financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The interviews focussed on case narrations given by the interviewees. See also Alberth et al. (2010).
Similarly, studies in the history of childhood usually stand in the tradition of the Annales School when dedicated to the body: Ariès (1994) illustrated the loss of freedom for children in their banishment from the street, which is essentially a loss of their bodies’ mobility and spatial freedom and dedicated a whole chapter of his ‘Centuries of Childhood’ on the body and its growing regulation (Ariès 1962). Farge and Revel (1991) described the child as a necessary element of the collective life of the Parisian quarters, where the monarchic executives provoked riots when imprisoning their children. de Mause, in his entirely different reconstruction (1975), builds his concept of modern childhood on the growing care for the child, corresponding with a decline of physical violence and neglect of children.
In return, this argument is valid for the sociology of the body, too. As the sub discipline works on a social theory of the body, children are excluded from such a project as they are seen as rather incompetent actors. Instead, its focus shifts toward old people and their loss of bodily agency (Dumas 2012; Wainwright and Turner 2004).
In our interviews, the professionals often refer to the ‘love of the child for its parents’ to explain the low rates of children who explicitly want to move out from home. Here is not the place to explain why the children want to be with their abusing parents. My point is that the generational order would not work, if children were entirely exploited.
The literal translation of this German term would be “endangerment of the child's well being”. As an unspecific legal term it refers to everything which puts the child at risk, especially with regard to its emotional, physical, and cognitive development. Usually it refers to physical maltreatment and all sorts of neglect. Its need for specification is the basis of the diagnostic work of child protection services. If a probable case of maltreatment or neglect is reported, a decision has to be made whether this case actually meets the professional definitions of maltreatment or neglect or not. In everyday practice a lot of reports are neither considered as maltreatment/neglect nor unproblematic with the effect that regularly help is offered to the families in order to prevent the worst. Thus the avoidance of “Kindeswohlgefährdung” is not identical with “child protection” (the German term being “Kindesschutz”) as the focus of the first usually refers to inadequate behavior of the parents whereas the latter expresses concern for the child’s safety.
This was the only case, in which the body of the child was depicted as being dangerous. Narrations given on young teens differ insofar as aggressive behavior was more often reported. Still, this was often framed as a psychological attribution of an uncooperative stance of the young client.
Alternative opening phrases were chosen less frequently: Of the 44 cases already analyzed, 20 started with “There is a mother…,” 11 with “There is a family…,” and 13 with “There is a child…”.
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Alberth, L. Body Techniques of Vulnerability: The Generational Order and the Body in Child Protection Services. Hum Stud 36, 67–88 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9259-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9259-z