Small Comfort (Child Protection in History and Culture)

Assembling a fascinating range of perspectives on childhood, care, and protection while highlighting the experiences of individual children, Small Comfort exposes the extent to which child protection discourses often privilege adult institutional, professional, and societal interests over children’s lived realities.

Multidisciplinary and transnational, the volume commences with a discussion of Canadian settler colonialism and its role in shaping the state’s management of children. Spanning the nineteenth through to the twenty-first centuries, the chapters range across Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. Contributors interrogate policies and discourses advanced by state actors, philanthropists, churches, and international organizations to protect children. Far from serving children’s interests, authors instead show how child protection frequently functioned as a mechanism of compulsory labour and forced migration. Although much of the evidence used comes from adult actors, Small Comfort centres children’s experiences and perspectives whenever possible to reveal how children shaped – or were excluded from shaping – the systems that governed their lives.

A timely and necessary volume that shows how histories of childhood, care, and protection continue to influence children’s rights and lived experiences around the world, including manifestations in popular culture.