The child refugee in Calais: from invisibility to the ‘suspect figure’

Abstract

This paper examines child refugees in the context of Calais in France, contextualizing them against the politics of the ‘Jungle’ (a makeshift camp) in policy and media discourses in the UK by delineating three distinct phases in the discursive production of these sites in the enactment of this ambiguous entity. These three phases trace the spatio-temporal emergence of the child refugee in the camps to their arrival in the UK. These camps, as transient and symbolic formations inhabited by the ‘dispossessed’ of forced global migration, provide a context in which the figure of the child is enacted from its incidental appearance to its visible manifestation to its final configuration as the ‘suspect figure’ in the UK. Through Derridean ‘hauntology’ of absent presence, the child refugee captures the conflicted morality of the West. As a disenfranchised entity, the child, forged through the turbulence of the Jungle, can be collapsed through the primal and deprived of his or her status as a child (and, in tandem, protection from harm) in public discourses. The child positioned as a ‘suspect figure’ becomes a spectral reflection of the beleaguered West, wrestling with the ideational image of the child and its recurrence as a threat to its moral reserve.