Surveillance and child protection: De-mystifying the Trojan horse

Abstract

This paper belongs to an embryonic body of scholarship that documents the camouflaging of political, economic and commercial agendas under the rhetoric of Child Protection. The Trojan Horse theory of Child Protection, as this scholarship may broadly be termed, alleges the misuse of Child Protection powers for ulterior motives. Years of struggle against the Law and Order, Psychiatric and other discourses have won a raft of Civil and Human Rights protections. Bypassing these protections, Child Protection provides a rhetoric that disguises surveillance and disarms opposition, because a justifiable and apparently benign pretext has been found in the ostensible and entirely laudable, aim of protecting children. The paper collates widespread evidence of how the pretext of Child Protection has been used to extend surveillance and disarm populations. Through the discourse of Child Protection, children are propelled through various constructions from ‘child in need’, to ‘child at risk’, to ‘potentially delinquent’, to ‘delinquent’, but in each case, transgressions of ever more restrictive and constantly morphing laws, regulations and expectations are used to infiltrate techniques of information gathering deeper into more intimate parts of the social body. Child Protection is now used to penetrate where orthodox policing can no longer go. Throughout the process of criminalisation, whether children are constructed as victim or transgressor, pretexts for expanding power and increasing profit are developed. Transgression by, or against, children, is used to further the economic, political and commercial interests in surveillance. To fully understand the relationship between surveillance and Child Protection, it is necessary to interrogate the information-sharing model that is built into the major Child Protection frameworks. The paper explores the manner in which Child Protection has been structured by the information- sharing model, to benefit the sectional interests in surveillance and the detrimental consequences that this has for children and young people.