(B)OrderS Seminar - How Child Protection Harms Refugees

When: Wednesday, February 12, 2025, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: Online or Room 313, Third Floor, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London Mile End Road London E1 4NS

In this seminar, Hedi Viterbo and Yulia Ioffe will critically discuss the notion, enshrined in international law, that child refugees are a uniquely vulnerable and dependent age group requiring special protection. Although protection is not inherently detrimental, they will demonstrate how this conception of child protection often ends up harming refugees of all ages. It casts adult refugees as less vulnerable, less dependent and less deserving of protection than their younger counterparts. It downplays the contextual, relational and socially constructed nature of vulnerability, dependence and childhood. It potentially contributes to the disregard for the capacity and wishes of child refugees. It usually affords these children only temporary protection, thereby increasing their uncertainty, driving them to disengage from welfare services and incentivizing the state to delay decisions about their entitlements. Meanwhile, international law not only places great value on children’s relationships with their parents but also authorizes the punishment of supposedly unfit parents, and this ambivalence helps states weaponize legal principles of child protection against refugee families. What is needed, however, is not for child refugees to be denied protection. Rather, a fundamental reimagining of protection is in order: a shift from hierarchies of vulnerability, dependence and deservingness towards free global movement based on solidarity and equity.

Dr Hedi Viterbo is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Law at Queen Mary University of London, as well as the founding director of the Childhood, Law & Policy Network (CLPN). Previously, he was Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Law at the University of Essex, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at SOAS (University of London), a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, and a visiting researcher at Columbia University. His research examines legal issues concerning childhood, state violence, and sexuality from an interdisciplinary and global perspective.

Dr Yulia Ioffe is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Law in the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR) at University College London (UCL). Before joining UCL, she was a postdoctoral fellow in children's rights law at Queen Mary University of London and a researcher in international refugee law at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Her primary research interests are in theory of international law (specifically the law of treaties), non-penalisation and non-criminalisation of refugees and other migrants, children's rights and forced migration, reparations for human rights violations, and sexual and gender-based violence in armed conflict.