| This study constructs a history of the child in the discourse of global human rights. It begins with the figure of child murder buried in the rhetoric of the French Revolutionary struggle for civil and political rights. Chapters one and two trace a British imperial itinerary across a range of cultural and historical texts to demonstrate that nowhere is the child the site of cultural contest more than in the struggle for its very survival. When the child is segregated from society, the perpetrator and victim of infanticide are interchangeable, enabling the trope to invert as a parricide. Chapter three claims that the social panic of infanticide inflecting most of nineteenth-century Britain is linked to the emergent discourse of child rights, while chapter four exposes the imperial rhetoric circulating today in the context of Australia's incarceration of political refugees that serves to legitimate the state's violation of adult-rights.;With each tutelary enterprise, the child re-forms to legitimize socio-political relations conceived in familial terms: when the child is brought to life as the survivor of infanticide, the child at risk, victim of authoritative paternal-maternal relations, becomes the child as risk , scapegoat of exclusionary fraternal relations of power. Based on something other than contractual law, the child-subject of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) brings a non-coercive mode of tutelage to the cross-cultural bargaining table. Adding the marginalized figure of the child to adult-centred debates on human rights changes everything, for the child obliges that economic, social, and cultural rights intervene in the unequal access to global resources. In short, the child of the CRC brings a set of principles for developing a global social ethics: to undo the murderous opposition between adult and child in the discourse of globalization is to insist that adult-centred theory makes more than nominal room for children. |
