Abstract
To be propelled to the future has long been considered the essence of modern childhood. As they grow up, children acquire the necessary knowledge and skills needed to develop into responsible adults. Children’s destiny is to be ‘waiting’ (Qvortrup, 2004), not only waiting to become adults but also waiting for economic prosperity, social justice and peace permitting everyone to live a joyful childhood and thriving adulthood without poverty, exploitative labour or discrimination. Investing in children is seen as the unique instrument that will make these developments possible. The futurity of children includes both the promise to improve individual children’s opportunities and the idea that the advancement of children will lead to improving the collective future of the nation (King, 2016). However, the promise of a bright and shining future can also be deceiving. Waiting children very well know that tomorrow might never come, and ask to also consider their present situation. One of the major drives for the emergence of the field of childhood studies in the 1990s was precisely to respond to developmental psychology and socialization theories, the then prevailing approaches to children and childhood, that were criticized for their almost exclusive focus on the adults that children will become, thereby overlooking children’s important present-day contributions (James, 2009). By patiently investigating children’s activities and contributions to their own lives and to the social world around them in the here and now, childhood studies privilege the study of the ‘being’ child of the present over the ‘becoming’ child of the future (James, 2009; Lee, 2001; Mayall, 2002). By emphasizing the ‘being’ child, childhood studies implicitly preserves the importance of the ‘becoming’ child discourse, the one providing a mirror of the other to which it is inextricably linked (Uprichard, 2008). The ‘being and becoming’ binary developed into a key analytical devise for understanding the interplay between children’s present and future that informs many current childhood research.
Considering the importance of time and temporality for the empirical study and theorizations of children and childhood (James and Prout, 1997), I am often left wondering where the ‘been’ child has gone. To understand children, individually and collectively, and childhood as a social category, I feel that we should give due consideration not only to how present and future are balanced but also to more explicitly embrace children’s and childhood’s past. Conceptually, the dialectic between the ‘being’ and the ‘becoming’ child needs to be complemented by a third component, the ‘been’ child. This proposal to organize the temporal dimensions of childhood studies in a three-sided pattern is inspired by the Danish artist Asger Jorn’s (1964) triolectical method. To overcome binary thinking in art, he reworked traditional dialectics by developing a method able to preserve dynamism, vitality and movement. In doing so, he suggested introducing ‘third’ positions rather than simple oppositions (see also Hanson and Nieuwenhuys, 2013). Jorn used the example of three-sided football to illustrate what he meant. Conventional two-sided football is a contest in which the ensuing struggle is informed by the law of the winner. In three-sided football, there are three teams and three goals and the pitch is hexagonal, which opens possibilities for strategic thinking, collaboration and indeterminacy. Compared to the binary being versus becoming, I believe that the triolectical conceptualization composed of ‘been’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ offers a more productive lens for the study of children and childhood, as it includes more complex relationships between children’s past, present and future.
The suggestion to investigate children and childhood through this triangular prism does not imply that the past has been completely absent from childhood studies (Uprichard, 2008). To gain a contextualized understanding of his or her research themes, every childhood scholar needs to include at least some elements of children’s and childhood’s past. Furthermore, since its inception, the field has been considerably inspired by Philippe Ariès’ (1962) work on childhood history and continues to build further on insights developed by the scientific study of the history of childhood (e.g. Fass, 2013). Recent articles published in Childhood demonstrate the productivity of a forthright inclusion of children’s past, together with their future and present. For example, in a study of childhood language brokering, the authors make use of a narrative analysis to show how the past, present and future are aligned in people’s stories (Orellana and Phoenix, 2017). By analysing how narratives of the past change as life circumstances evolve, this research shows that temporality is not a linear process but that we can find simultaneous and continuing traces of the past in the present, allowing to overcome even the binary between childhood and adulthood. The understanding of temporality as a non-linear dynamic process also emerges as a central theme in an article that examined experiences of how transnational adoptees see their own circulation as children (Yngvesson, 2013). In contrast to standardized adoption discourses that refer to transnational adoption as involving a break from the past to forge a new identity, the analysis of narratives by adoptees shows how their past is very alive in the present. The article draws on the concept of ‘dynamic temporality’, which was earlier proposed in an article by Rachel Conrad (2011) based on her study of poems written by young people. The notion ‘dynamic temporality’ stresses the importance to overcome the being/becoming dichotomy by including the past as part of both present and future. In her book on childhood and processes of collective identity formation in Western India, Véronique Benei (2008) shows how an embodied sense of nationalism comes about through schooling. Her work heavily draws on the past in order to show how children’s national identities come about and how that impacts the presence and future both of the children and of the nation as a whole. To understand what children are, we do need to understand not only their past, present and future but also the mutable relations and shifting sequences between these temporal orders.
The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which forms an integral part of the broad human rights project, is generally connected to the well-being and rights of children in light of their development as adults. In addition, in providing a basis for claims to respect children’s rights in the present, the Convention recognizes children’s status as legal subjects and rights holders in the here and now. Relatively absent from the gaze are provisions that make explicit reference to children’s past, either individually or collectively. For example, according to Article 8 of the CRC, the child has the right to preserve his or her identity, which includes nationality, name and family relations, elements that all refer to the child’s history. Likewise, Article 30 of the CRC calls attention to the rights of children who belong to ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities, or of children who are indigenous, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion or to use their own language. Both provisions illustrate that the CRC not only needs to balance between children’s fundamental rights in the present (such as the right to be heard of Article 12 of the CRC) and the rights concerned with their development and future lives as adults (such as the best interests of the child principle contained in Article 3 of the CRC) but also needs to take into account rights related to children’s individual and collective past.
Although oriented to the present and the future, human and children’s rights contain important elements of the past that is not a fixed entity but functions as a third position that stands in a dynamic temporal relationship with both the present and the future. In the domain of human rights and humanitarian law, the project to establish international human rights norms and policies is firmly rooted in the events precipitated in the wake of the Second World War. The development of transitional justice processes that are applied in post-conflict situations illustrates how human rights and social justice are inherently rooted in the past (Malcontent, 2016). Transitional justice comprises legal precepts, such as the establishment of post-conflict truth-telling commissions or special tribunals for the prosecution of individuals accused of grave human rights violations, as well as the adoption of memory laws, history education and the creation of symbolic reminders of past wrongdoings, for instance, public monuments, museums or public holidays in remembrance of past struggles. The attractiveness of these transitional justice instruments lies herein that they aim at integrating past sufferings into the present and future development of social justice, democracy and human rights. In post-conflict situations, the past cannot be just forgotten and forgiven. This is true also in situations where young people have actively been involved in armed conflicts. After the conflict, the individual and collective histories of young people too need to be taken into account in order to disentangle the complex social realities in which violent struggles have occurred and where young people made decisions related to their own involvement in the conflict. The involvement of children and young people in armed conflicts on the African continent cannot be understood, as the historian Jézéquel reminds us, ‘without re-contextualising it in the larger frame of a middle-to-long historical view of children in African society (Jézéquel, 2006: 6). Such a historical understanding can contribute, together with anthropological and ethnographic insights, to gaining a more nuanced view of the complex origins, operational details and consequences of armed conflicts in order to address the ‘network of social problems’ (Rosen, 2007) occasioned by war. Not only child soldiers but also vulnerable members of societies, including victims of war, need to be given ‘a sense that justice has been achieved, whatever the cultural context’ (Rosen, 2007: 304). The debate on the voluntary, obligatory or forced nature of young people’s participation as soldiers in armed conflicts cannot be properly understood without taking into account the multiple temporal factors including children’s individual past, their families’ and communities’ history, present dealings with children’s criminal responsibility during armed conflict, children’s economic and social prospects and the way how the past will be given a place in future. To develop respect for human rights in the future, both wrongdoings of the past and respect for individual rights and freedoms in the present need to be assigned a rightful place.
The idea to move beyond binaries and incorporate a collective past into the understanding of children’s experiences and circumstances joins the endeavour of postcolonial studies that seek to integrate the legacy of colonialism in our thinking (Nieuwenhuys, 2013; Viruru, 2005). Embracing the ‘been’ child is an invitation, similar to the postcolonial perspective, to replace the ‘Us vs. Them’ binary by ‘a conceptualization of childhood(s) as the unstable and contingent result of a situated encounter’ (Nieuwenhuys, 2013: 5). I feel that the triolectical prism composed of ‘been’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, more than the binary ‘being’ versus ‘becoming’, can offer a productive conceptual lens for studying how children’s present-days engagements with their own lives and the social world around them can integrate the complex and dynamic articulation of children’s and childhood’s individual and collective past and future. In doing so, embracing the ‘been’ child might even lead to moving children from the periphery to the centre of the social world itself, that always incorporates dynamic but indeterminate relationships between past, present and future.