On Thursday, 25th February at 4 pm – 5.30 pm, join us for an afternoon of presentations and discussion around the theme "Children’s rights discourse.” We are proud to be joined by two scholars: Dr Hedi Viterbo (Queen Mary University of London) and Dr Yuval Saar-Heiman (Royal Holloway, University of London). The event will be chaired by Professor Ravinder Barn (Department of Law and Criminology - RHUL) and it is organised by the Families & Children Research Cluster.
About this event
Children’s rights are human rights and protected by international law to help all children to develop their full potential. Organised by our Families & Children Research Cluster, this webinar brings together two scholars to help explore issues and concerns of the rights of children.
On Thursday, 25th February at 4 pm – 5.30 pm, join us for an afternoon of presentations and discussion around the theme "Children’s rights discourse.”
We are proud to be joined by two scholars: Dr Hedi Viterbo (Queen Mary University of London) and Dr Yuval Saar-Heiman (Royal Holloway, University of London). The event will be chaired by Professor Ravinder Barn (Department of Law and Criminology - RHUL) and it is organised by the Families & Children Research Cluster.
Presentations:
- “The Complicity of Child Rights in State Violence: Lessons from the Israeli-Palestinian Case?" (Dr Hedi Viterbo)
- “Poverty, Child Protection, and the Rights of Children (and Their Families?)" (Dr Yuval Saar-Heiman)
This is a free online event and will be hosted using MS Teams. To join the event, please Click here to join the meeting.
Abstracts and bios
“The Complicity of Child Rights in State Violence: Lessons from the Israeli-Palestinian Case?”
- Dr Hedi Viterbo (Queen Mary University of London)
Using Israel/Palestine as a test case, Hedi Viterbo will argue in this talk that the children's rights discourse has become increasingly complicit in state violence. He will bring to light Israel's growing use of international children's rights law as a means of entrenching, perfecting, and laundering its oppressive control regime. In particular, this talk will focus on how both Israel and the liberal human rights community invoke children's rights in ways that legitimise harshness and apathy towards Palestinian adults.
About the speaker:
Dr Hedi Viterbo is a lecturer in law at Queen Mary University of London. Previously, he was a lecturer in law at the University of Essex, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at SOAS, 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. Amongst his publications is the co-authored book The ABC of the OPT: A Legal Lexicon of the Israeli Control over the Palestinian Territory (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His second book – Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine – will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year.
“Poverty, Child Protection, and the Rights of Children (and Their Families?)”
- Dr Yuval Saar-Heiman (Royal Holloway, University of London)
The individualized discourses associated with the neoliberal politics of ‘risk’ focus on individual deficit and responsibility and pay little attention to the social determinants of harm or the social contexts of families’ lives and thus largely ignore the complex, multifaceted causes of parental difficulties. Yet the detrimental effects of poverty on children are well documented with regard to a range of developmental dimensions and clear link has been established between children’s social deprivation, particularly as it may be reflected in their inability to live with their family of origin, and their life chances.
While poverty has long been recognized as a violation of human rights, in the context of the child protection system, it is often obscured and children’s rights are often juxtaposed with parents’ rights, with the primary focus on children’s right to protection. The tension between perceived children’s rights and perceived parents’ rights intensifies in the context of poverty. Othering of poor families is rife in risk-averse child protection systems and reinforced by extremely imbalanced power relations with practitioners with the result that parents are easily blamed and held responsible for their children’s situation.
In my presentation, I will argue that the parents’ rights/children’s rights binary is unhelpful and there is a need for a more complex understanding of children's rights in relation to poverty and state intervention. More specifically, I will demonstrate how the Poverty-Aware paradigm—a critical framework for social work practice—offers an alternative conceptualization of children's rights, one that promotes solidarity with parents and calls for a relational and contextual ethical stance towards what are perceived as the best interests of the child.
About the speaker:
Dr Yuval Saar-Heiman completed his PhD at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Spitzer Department of Social Work. His doctoral research addressed the relationship between poverty, child protection, and social work practice. Yuval is currently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Work of Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is conducting a comprehensive study on parent advocacy programs in the UK under the supervision of Prof. Anna Gupta. His research aims to offer a comprehensive view of the development of parent advocacy programs, parents' involvement in policy design, and participatory practices with parents of children at risk of child abuse and neglect.
