Description
Children have always been impacted by both terrorist actions and counter-terrorism measures. Looking specifically at the UK context, since the period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, laws, policies and practices that aim at protecting the nation’s security in the face of terrorist violence have affected – to varying degrees and in gendered, racialised and classed ways – the lives of children deemed to be from the ‘suspect community.’ However, in recent years, counter-terrorism laws and policies have directly targeted children. Fuelled by the rise of ISIS in 2014 and the spectre of children who left the UK – either on their own or with their families – to join terrorist organisations in the Middle East, has been multifaceted and comprehensive. The include both “hard” and “soft” counter-terrorism measures such as: an unprecedented rise in children arrested for committing terrorism offences; designating extremism and radicalisation as new child-protection and safeguarding concerns leading to monitoring of children in mental health and education settings for signs of radicalisation; increasing number of referrals to official counter-radicalisation and de-radicalisation programmes; removal of children from their homes due to suspected or actual radicalisation and even the recruitment of children as spies. Remarkably, these counter-terrorism measures have been justified by reference to child-welfare and the best interests of the child principle. Childhood has, therefore, become a new frontier in the ever-expanding War on Terror.
In outlining, and interpreting, these developments, the paper argues that there now exists a nexus between child-welfare and national security such that security is welfare and welfare is security. Whilst NGOs and some academics have noted – and critiqued – this development, focusing on its racialised dimensions and the adverse impact that it is having on children’s rights, what is missing is a close, theoretical examination. How did we get here? Why has the child now become the subject of the counter-terrorist state? And what are the implications of this on children’s rights and on the relationship between the child and the state?
This paper attempts to answer these questions by excavating the different (competing yet overlapping) conceptions – or constructions – of the child and childhood that underpin, justify, and further facilitate the securitisation of children. Some of these constructions, the paper finds, are enduring, and some are rather new and striking. So, we find that seemingly contradictory counter-terrorism laws and policies recreate the ‘victim/threat’ duality that has historically underscored laws and policies relating to children. The idea that childhood is nothing more than preparatory phase for (“good,” non-extreme) adulthood, and that the child is an investment in the nation’s future – particularly its future security – is also present. These constructions of childhood are also prescriptive. “Normal” childhood, they suggest, should be a-political, secular, and should be primarily located – and balanced – between the private sphere of the family home and the citizen-making school. The child is at once the family’s child and the (counter-terrorist) state’s child. A childhood lived online, or in political marches or demonstrations, is a dangerous childhood.
