Perspectives on Children's Active Engagement with Migration in the Southeast Asian Context
Author(s): R. Huijsmans
This paper serves as a background paper for the February 2009 workshop of the same name. Over the last few years a focus on children's active engagement with diverse forms of migration has emerged. This perspective focuses on children and young people's positioning as social actors in diverse sets of social relations which comprise migration processes. A focus on children's active engagement with migration thus contrasts the human trafficking narrative which dominates many a debate, since it questions children and young people's assumed passivity in migration, and broadens the scope of the debate on ‘children & migration' beyond a focus on the ‘sex industry'. This broader focus ranges from children's renewed position in the household as ‘left-behinds' following migration of parents to (mostly older) children acting as migrant workers. It is the premise of this workshop that a focus on children's active engagement with migration finds its appeal only partly in observed rising levels of migration and children's involvement in this. Instead, this workshop aims to address children's active engagement with migration as an area of dynamic interplay between a globalised, normative understanding of childhood, and conceptual and theoretical innovations developed in the social theory on childhood. Subsequently, this workshop is less concerned about numbers and magnitude of the phenomenon (although its importance is not denied), but aims primarily to explore a series of conceptual, theoretical and methodological challenges related to children's active engagement with migration.