Combatting Child Poverty in the Childhood Moratorium: A Representational Lens on Children’s Rights

Abstract

The focus on ‘child poverty’ in policy, practice and academia (in industrialized countries) has increased significantly in recent years. This is in large part due to the increasing number of children growing up in poverty. Child poverty is generally considered as a violation of children’s rights, as they are recognized in the Convention on the Rights. In this chapter we discuss the issue of ‘child poverty’ in relation to children’s rights, relying on the work of Nancy Fraser. Fraser developed an understanding of social justice as ‘parity of participation’ that consists of three domains: redistribution, recognition and representation. In this contribution, we suggest that children in poverty are represented differently compared to their parents in poverty in claims for social justice. For children, demands for combatting child poverty appear within the ‘childhood moratorium’. The childhood moratorium can be considered as a separate and exclusive domain for children with social provisions such as the school, youth work and youth care. In this childhood moratorium, children are represented as the ‘victim of poverty’ and are thought of as the ‘deserving poor’. Consequently, investing in child care and education, for instance, is widely regarded as the best way to combat child poverty. In contrast, parents are represented as the ‘undeserving poor’, responsible for their own poverty situation and the poverty situation of their children. Therefore, activating measures are set up to compel parents to take responsibility. The distinction between the way in which children and parents are represented needs to be understood from a particular interpretation of children’s rights. Despite the fact that a child rights-based approach is set forward as an important frame of reference to combat child poverty, different interpretations can exist of such an approach, resulting in different ideas on the representation of children and parents. Based on in-depth interviews with 30 families living in poverty, we argue that a segregated approach of the representation of children and parents in poverty can be considered as a problem of ‘misrepresentation’. This injustice can have a negative impact on realizing children’s rights for children living in poverty. This is so because such an approach narrows the social problem of poverty down to an educational problem. Opposite to that is an approach of child poverty from a children’s rights perspective that connects both representational claims of children with representational claims of parents.