Judith Ennew

Only connect! … Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. (EM Forster, Howard’s End, 1910)

It was with enormous sadness that I learned that Judith Ennew died on 4 October 2013. Judith was one of the few members of the editorial board of Childhood who was with us from the very start, having attended the first founding meeting in Norway in May 1992, with Editor Ivar Frønes and the newly appointed board members (there were 14 of them at the time). The first issue of Childhood was published in 1993. Judith also acted as Guest Editor for two special issues (1996, with Mark Connolly, and 2002, with me). We often turned to her for advice and support, and she refereed countless papers and encouraged numerous authors to submit their work to us. Her death thus marks the culmination of 21 years of collaboration, but the spirit of what Judith contributed to the study of children will live on. Writing this editorial gives me an opportunity to reflect on Judith’s work, and the contribution she made to the scientific study of children and childhood globally.

Judith originally trained as a primary school teacher and had come to Cambridge to study for a BEd at Lucy Cavendish College in 1972, then took the Certificate in Social Anthropology that then led to her PhD in social anthropology, based on an ethnography of the impact of the oil industry on the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, awarded in 1978. With Paul Hirst and Keith Tribe, she wrote a seminal paper about peasant modes of production and the division of labour, and this may well have led her into research with children as economic actors who play an important part in household production and consumption (Beazley et al., 2014). The year 1979 was the International Year of the Child, and from then onwards, Judith’s energies were focused on aspects of children’s rights, and developing sound methods for studying children. She worked with Anti-Slavery International and undertook research in Jamaica (1981), followed by research in Peru with children who live and work on the streets (1985). Judith always started with a clear and deliberate focus on the socio-economic situation of children and insisted that their everyday lives could only be understood in context. In the subsequent years, she constantly combined research and activism, working mostly in the Global south and occasionally in the United Kingdom (she authored the England and Wales Country report for the Childhood as a Social Phenomenon project coordinated by Jens Qvortrup).

Judith constantly confronted the lack of good quality, systematic information about children’s lives and daily experiences, and the dominance of ‘victimhood’ approaches not only to the study of childhood but the practice of professionals working with children. She was not only irritated by the tendency for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international NGOs (INGOs) to produce what she called ‘guestimates’ – wild statistics not based on any systematic research – about the prevalence of child labour, or street children, she also wanted people to think differently about children. So instead of focusing on children’s passive, victimhood status, she wanted people to understand that children act, often managing constraints and difficulties in constructive and positive ways. She wanted to avoid sensationalism and prior judgements in relation to children. This is most notable in her books, The Sexual Exploitation of Children (1986) and The Next Generation (1989, co-authored with Brian Milne). The importance of systematic, scientific research ran through her work. The manual Children in Focus that she edited with Jo Boyden (1997) is used globally, and one of Judith’s legacies will surely be The Right to be Properly Researched (2009), a practical manual of how to do scientific research with children. Her work for Childwatch International produced case studies for Senegal and Zimbabwe, and she also advised on a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report on Tanzania. In many respects, she was 20 years ahead of her time. In the late 1990s, she cautioned against romanticising ‘children’s voices’, long before critiques of participation had developed.

Judith was fond of EM Forster’s sentiment behind ‘Only connect! … Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted’ – this epitomises her spirit for me. Judith was a great facilitator of other people’s work, encouraging numerous junior researchers, generously spending her time with them/us, sharing her knowledge and expertise widely. She was constantly bringing people together and linking people up, informally and formally. In the 1980s, she started a series of ‘Ethnography of Childhood’ workshops, the first of which was held in King’s College, Cambridge in 1986, with 60 practitioners and academics from differing disciplines. The first workshop aimed to discuss appropriate methods for studying social and cultural influences on childhood, intending to provide a social perspective on childhood and working with children as the units of analysis, to complement and extend the existing medical, psychological and educational models. The second workshop in the series was held in Camrose, Alberta, Canada, in 1987, and the third in Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1988, focused on childhood and social policy – many members of the later European Childhood as a Social Phenomenon project attended, and the workshop led to the production of the edited volume by Allison James and Alan Prout – Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood. The fourth Ethnography of Childhood workshop was held in Zimbabwe in 1989 (and much later, the fifth workshop was held in Singapore in 2006). Judith’s reach and vision for these workshops was global, and through these workshops, she wanted to develop networks of researchers in every region of the world to further the social study of children and childhood, to move on from the NGO-driven problem-oriented approach to categories of children in specific circumstances that so dominated the international agenda about children during the 1980s and 1990s (children in especially difficult circumstances (CEDCs), street children, working children, etc.). In the late 1980s/early 1990s, she set up Streetwise International, which was intended to link networks of researchers together to pool information and resources – and this was before the days of the Internet. At the same time, Judith was working (with Brian Milne) on The Next Generation, published by Zed Press. She felt this was her most influential publication, and I remember how proud she was of its widespread distribution and sales.

Judith was passionate about the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). She found it frustrating, I think, that people were lazy or sloppy in their thinking/writing about the UN CRC – and insisted firmly that while UN CRC (like all UN conventions and the UN system itself) is by no means perfect, ‘it is all we have’. She moved from initial critique and scepticism (1989, The Next Generation) towards an increasing embracing of the UN CRC as crucial tool to further children’s human rights. She emphasised the importance of paying attention to the history, context and drafting process of the UN CRC, and understanding that the UN CRC is about all children, everywhere, all the time, emphasising the principles of dignity, equality, non-discrimination and participation. She bemoaned the attachment of rights as enshrined in UN conventions to nation states because this left stateless children outside the reach of the UN CRC– but was emphatic, finally, that the UN CRC is of fundamental importance. To dismiss it as a Western construct, was, in her view, not good enough.

Judith was a maverick. She wanted change as well as sound empirical knowledge on which to base ideas about what needed to change. Her biography reflects a tireless interplay between action and research. In the early 1990s, she moved from academic life to take up a full-time position as Director of Y Care International, the development agency of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in the United Kingdom. Subsequently, she coordinated Childwatch International’s ‘Monitoring Children’s Rights -Indicators for Children’s Rights’ project’. She moved to Bangkok in the early 2000s, and in 2006, she set up Knowing Children, an NGO that aimed to strengthen capacity in rights-based research with children, especially with local researchers and activists. She would happily roll up her sleeves and get on with the practical tasks of sitting on the floor with children and others, getting involved in training anybody and everybody, from practitioners, representatives of government departments to first-year undergraduates and doctoral students.

Judith was my PhD supervisor, but I had first met her in 1986 when, as a final-year social anthropology student at Cambridge, I was in dire need of inspiration. Along the corridor in the attic of the Department of Social Anthropology, through the fire door into the Social and Political Sciences Department, together with my friend Margaret Guy, we found Judith, and the inspiration we were searching for. She supervised us in economic anthropology, and was a terrific teacher, challenging and pushing our thinking forwards, outwards and critically in so many ways. One of the things she asked us to do was to write an extended essay about the relations of production and labour involved in making an object that was of some emotional value to us – and I researched children’s work in the carpet industry in Kashmir, because I had purchased a rug in Srinagar in 1980 – it still hangs on my wall. To this day, I continue to research children’s work.

Judith used the power of ideas to ‘think differently’ about children, and to question the norms and assumptions and the imagery that are attached to children and childhood. All the while, she continued to publish copiously (the prose behind the passion). She wrote beautifully, clearly and concisely and expected others to do the same. She was a fierce critic – my ‘mock’ viva for my PhD was conducted on the front porch of her house in the Cambridgeshire countryside, with the menagerie of dogs, chickens, pottering around our feet, one sunny afternoon. Suffice to say (and no disrespect to my examiners), it was much more challenging than the real thing.

Besides all this, Judith was a poet, wonderful cook, gardener, great fun to be with, a good friend and fierce defender of teenage parents. She was so proud of her son and her grandchildren, Luke and Amy. Her generosity was remarkable (often to the despair of her friends) – if she had any money, she gave it away – there are countless examples, but one that stands out in my mind is the way she helped James, a taxi driver in Nairobi, to start his own business – which became so successful, he repaid her.

In the aftermath of Judith’s death and before her funeral, numerous tributes were sent to Knowing Children, the organisation she had established in 2006. The remarkable thing about the 50-page document that Jasmin Lim produced in a very short space of time was that people had written in from a total of 31 countries. If there had been more time, I am sure we could trace Judith’s reach to nearly every country in the world. Judith’s life and work was truly global. Harriot Beazley, Sharon Bessell and Roxana Waterson have written a moving celebration of Judith’s life and contribution to the field of research with children (Beazley et al., 2014). A special issue of Children’s Geographies is also planned.

Looking forwards, what will Judith’s legacy be? Judith said she would retire at 70, and she nearly made it. At the end of this editorial is a list of Judith’s publications, many of which are available online. I am confident that generations of researchers will be reading them and drawing on her ideas in years to come. Given the vast amount of research that is now carried out with children (as opposed to ‘on’ children) and the success of journals like Childhood, Children’s Geographies and Children & Society, it is hard to remember just how radical Judith’s ideas were. She and those she worked with found themselves constantly having to defend themselves against the dominant view, which was largely that children ‘can’t know anything at all’ and thus adults have to speak for them. Thanks to Judith’s substantial contributions and efforts, we who are working in this field no longer have to fight for the idea that children do things independently and differently to adults, and that they can be co-producers of scientific data. Her advocacy for a holistic approach to understanding children’s lives – instead of the focus on particular categories of children – will continue to inspire both academic and policy debates in future. It is interesting to note that currently there are signs of more thematic approaches to phenomena that affect all children, everywhere, for example, children protection, violence against children and childhood poverty, which can be seen as an expression of the approach towards children which Judith treasured and fought for.