Imagining The Migrant Child: on Flexible Realities, Forced Identities and Fake Moralities

• In Event: Roundtable: On the Concept of Exploitation: Manipulating Migrant Identities in the Trafficking Discourse

Abstract

In our late modern era, characterized by mobility in different ways, there is a lot at stake when defining migration and migrants. Affected as we are by risk-thinking, securitization and a ‘culture of fear’, governments in Western Europe have an interest to clearly demarcate the part of the young migrant population they consider ‘deserving child victims of trafficking’ (entitled to our support and help), from those ‘undeservingly’ profiting from our welfare system, manipulating the benefits included therein, and threatening our security and safety with their criminal tendencies. No matter how heterogeneous, pluriform, ambiguous and nuanced young migrants’ realities may be, this need to differentiate them demands forcing migrant identities and realities into predefined, ‘flat’ social categories, at sometimes high costs. This contribution will discuss this issue by zooming in on some examples derived from ethnographic (case) studies on child trafficking in the Netherlands and France.

Author

• Brenda Carina Oude Breuil, Utrecht University