Abstract
Using the recent situation at the USA–Mexico border as a launching point, this chapter traces a long history in which governmental authority deployed in the name of child rescue has inflicted harms equivalent to those we now associate largely with human trafficking. The logic behind these harmful “rescues” has been propped upon a legal and cultural investment in childhood innocence that renders children’s perspectives irrelevant to determining what interventions are required to help them. By examining the resilience of enslaved and trafficked children in the past, this chapter adds historical evidence to the emerging argument in social science and humanities scholarship that advocates for child-centered advocacy and support. In addition to evidence that child-centered focus has clinical efficacy, such a practice, if thoroughly embraced, opens a space for furthering children’s rights in ways that would help ameliorate their political and legal vulnerabilities.
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Notes
- 1.
In England at this time, the average age of a newly married woman hovered slightly above twenty-five.
- 2.
According to Ballentine’s legal dictionary, “res sacra” is commonly translated in the law to mean: “A sacred thing does not admit of valuation.” Ballentine’s Law Dictionary (1916). The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
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Duane, A.M. (2021). The Long History of Child Saving as Nation Building in the USA: An Argument for Privileging Children’s Perspectives on Recovery. In: Chisolm-Straker, M., Chon, K. (eds) The Historical Roots of Human Trafficking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70675-3_12
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