Bulletin IINfancia N° 10 - December 2020

Bulletin 10

December 2020

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Luis Almagro OAS Secretary General Néstor Méndez OAS Assistant Secretary General Lolis María Salas Montes IIN Directing Council President Teresa Martínez IIN Directing Council Vice President Víctor Giorgi IIN Director General Daniel Claverie IIN Contents Coordinator Ingrid Quevedo IIN Technical Assistant of Communication Sara Cardoso Caterina Pertusso IIN Design Edition December 2020

The IIN is as Specialized Organization of the Organization of American States (OAS) in childhood and adolescence, which assists the States in the development of public policies to be taken for the benefit of children and adolescents, contributing in the field of their design and implementation in the perspective of the promotion, protection and full respect of the rights of children and adolescents in the region. Special assistance is aimed at the needs of the Member States of the Inter-American System and at the particularities of the regional groups.

The concepts expressed in this publication are the responsibility of each author.

The IIN is pleased to enable this space for exchange and reflection with the region.

ÍNDEX Prologue...............................................................................9 The paths of child-youth citizenship in Brazil. Historical Fragments..........................................................................12 Successes and failures in the exercise of the right of the child to be heard in judicial settings...........................................28 A discursive construction of childhood...............................40 (De)institutionalizing children. Progress and challanges in the State of Mexico...........................................................56 The Coercive Power of Debt: Migration and Deportation of Guatemalan Indigenous Youth............................................67 Humanizing from the immediacy of bodies. Children and education; territories for social transformation..................76 The situation of institutionalized children and adolescents.

An account of a reality which is denied in Mexico...............91 The right belongs and must belong to children: points for reflection on shaping sport as a human right......................99 The CENDI model of the ‘Land and Freedom’ People’s Front: Thirty years of lessons in the social transformation of vulnerable populations in Nuevo León, Mexico.................114

To return to the index, click on this imageat the beginning of each article.

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Prologue Víctor Giorgi Director General - IIN

Once again, we are pleased to present our readers with a new volume of the IINfancia Newsletter, the official publication of the IIN OAS. This is the tenth newsletter, proof of the continuity and regularity with which we have kept up this publication for five years. A continuity that has involved an effort on the part of the IIN’s technical team, but that has only been possible thanks to the constancy and continuity of the contributions of colleagues who, from different countries and with their multiple backgrounds and outlooks, have provided content for these ten issues.

As usual, this newsletter includes work on different topics, always associated with the ‘rights agenda’. Issues such as institutionalization, participation, migrant children, the need to rethink education by moving towards comprehensiveness; nor

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is the historical perspective on the implementation of policies with a rights-based perspective and the social representation of children that permeates cross-generational ties lacking.

We are at a particularly critical moment in time for America and the world. COVID-19 and its ‘side effects’ have altered social life in all its aspects, impacting most especially on children and adolescents.

The articles compiled do not explicitly refer to this topic.

However, here at the IIN, we are increasingly convinced that, in the reality of the Americas, COVID-19 has functioned as a kind of reagent that tinges and sheds light on aspects that have so far been less evident and visible. Problems related to different forms of rights violations, inequities, real and symbolic violence resulting from adult-centrism, the dramatic issue of migration and the fragility of protection systems have always been present in the most inequitable and violent region of the planet.

International agencies forecast an average drop of GDP of 8% for 2021. Beyond these uncertainties and the limitations of futurology, it seems clear that years of retraction and poverty lie ahead. If this decline is apportioned as usual, the distribution of wealth and poverty in the region will inevitably be borne by the backs of children and adolescents from the most vulnerable sectors; that is, the majority of children on the continent.

Consequently, there will be more poverty, greater vulnerability, the weakening of families, the deterioration of community capacities, as well as fewer resources for the States to assume their role as duty bearers.

Indicators already exist to show that ‘emergencies’ favour the implementation of specific actions, centred and focusing to an excessive degree on ‘primary needs’, thus shaping a regression from a rights-based perspective - painstakingly developed over

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the course of more than three decades- to palliative policies to address needs.

In this context, as at other difficult times on our continent, we must encourage the sharing of opportunities, the convergence of efforts, and critical thinking and attitudes, and reaffirm the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its principles as a guide to action.

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T he paths of child-youth citizenship in Brazil.

Historical Fragments

By Antonio José Ángelo Motti

‘Children and adolescents: what life experience are we offering them today, at this present time, which will one day become their modelling past?’1 This substantial quotation, from one of the most brilliant guiding lights and drafters of national legislation embodying the Doctrine of Comprehensive Protection, prompts us to ponder how our contemporary traditions behave in the direction of making statutory principles effective, and furthermore: what past are we building: a past organized in traditions that guarantee, promote and defend the human rights of girls and boys, or a past that, reproducing previous traditions, is organized in practices that ignore, disregard and violate the human rights of girls and boys?

The history of Brazilian children must be visited, reflected upon and, above all, revealed in the dynamics of that long trajectory, because it will certainly provide information that will ensure 1 Edson Seda, lawyer, educator, member of the statute drafting committee, extracted from his work Construir o Passado, Editora Adês, Campinas, 1993, an edition revised by the author in 2018.

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that the reasons for the great distance between reality and what is provided for in the set of legal norms that aim to make child citizenship effective are better understood.

During the 1990s, Brazil and many other countries experienced the emergence of profound changes in their understanding of the meaning of childhood, giving rise to the so-called recognition of children and adolescents as full holders of rights – as bearers of rights. Recognized as people in a developmental condition appropriate to their ages. It is in this sense that the principle of providing absolute priority to the rights of the population arises.

Fragments of histoy The history of childhood in Brazil is permeated by deprivation and omissions, and particularly marked by abuse, sexual violations, mortality, misery, hunger, abandonment, slavery, etc.

The first actions aimed at correcting this situation were carried out by the Jesuits, following a European model that differed greatly from the reality of children who were living in colonial Brazil, which led to serious difficulties in adapting them to the Jesuit pedagogical proposal. For the Jesuits, ‘Childhood is perceived as a suitable time for catechesis because it is also a time of anointing, enlightenment and revelation [...] A visceral moment of renouncing the native culture of indigenous girls and boys’ (Del Priori, 1995, cited in Passeti n.d., p. 4).

According to Neto, in the eighteenth century: ‘[...] a resounding number of abandoned babies were left by their mothers at night, in the dirty streets. They were often eaten by dogs and other animals that lived in the area, or victimized by the elements or by hunger’ (Neto, 2000, p. 107).

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As a solution to this situation, considered chaotic, so-called foundling wheels were installed in the colony. According to Passeti, ‘[...] the first was installed at the Holy House of Mercy, in Salvador, in 1726. Still in the colonial period, a second and final wheel was installed in Recife. These wheels continued to function even after Brazil’s independence. In 1825, a further wheel was installed in the Holy House of Mercy of São Paulo’ (Passeti, n.d., p. 10).

This wheel was a device in which babies who were abandoned could be placed by anyone who wished to do so. It was cylindrical in shape, divided in half, and inserted on to a wall or window of the institution. The baby was placed in one of the parts of the mechanism, which had an external opening.

Then, the wheel was turned towards the other side of the wall or window, allowing the baby to be moved inwards into the institution. According to the ritual, the person who had brought the child pulled on a rope attached to a bell in order to notify the watchman or person in charge of the wheel of the arrival of a baby, and then immediately left the place (Passeti, n.d., p. 9).

According to official records, young children were for the first time subject to legal regulations upholding their interests with the advent of the Freedom of Wombs Law, instituted in 1871 - Law No. 2,040. In its articles 1 and 2, it ensured that children born of slaves would be free persons, and prohibited the sale of girls or boys under the age of 12.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘protective’ actions on behalf of girls and boys were the responsibility of the Holy Houses of Mercy and of some parishes, especially in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In 1911, the Government of the Republic established the Seventh of September Institute in the then Capital of the Republic, with the aim of gathering and caring for abandoned street children in the city, as well as those 14

involved in crime. This was the precursor of the official actions of the Brazilian State, which later led to the Child Assistance Service (SEAM for its acronym in Portuguese) of 1941, which, in turn, gave rise to FUNABEM, in 1964.

Due to its exclusionary and repressive practices, inherited from the Institute that preceded it, SEAM was opposed by Carioca society (the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro) throughout its existence, until 1964, when the National Child Welfare Policy (PNBEM, in Portuguese) was established, implemented by the National Foundation for Child Welfare (FUNABEM). The PNBEM was applied nationwide. The Seventh of September Institute, SEAM and FUNABEM emerged under the orbit of the Ministry of Justice, although the latter was transferred to the Ministry of Social Security from 1972 to 1986.

As regards the justice system, it was only in 1923 that the first Juvenile Court was established in the country, with the mission, among other duties, of bringing into Brazilian legislation the Doctrine of the Irregular Situation, which was accomplished in 1927 with the first Juvenile Code, known as the Melo Mattos.

With the constitutions approved by Vargas, the Code underwent minor alterations, although it prevailed in essence until 1979, when Brazil adopted the Cavaliere Code, the second Brazilian Minors’ Code, still inspired in the same doctrine, established here in 1927, even though at that period, the Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1924, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1959 governed the world.

Interestingly enough, in 1979 the UN instituted, at the instigation of Poland, an ad hoc group to cover all the territories of the planet over ten years, with a view to drafting a Basic Text for the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, with the purpose of advancing international legislation towards the

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Doctrine of Comprehensive Protection. This Convention was adopted at the 1989 UN General Assembly.

So, what did the Doctrine of the Irregular Situation intend?

The Doctrine of the Irregular Situation established that Justice should act in situations involving abandonment, criminal offences, deviant conduct, lack of legal assistance or representation, material deprivation, among others. The law was not intended as a preventative: it dealt with the conflict that had already arisen. In this case, the conflict entailed being in an irregular situation before society and the public authorities.

Art. 2. For the purposes of this Code, minors are considered to be in an irregular situation when they are: I. Deprived of the conditions essential to their subsistence, health and compulsory education, if any, by reason of: a) the failure, act or omission of parents or responsible persons; b) a manifest impossibility for the parents or responsible persons to provide them; II. Victims of abuse or immoderate punishment imposed by the parents or responsible person; III. In moral danger, due to: a) habitually finding themselves in an environment contrary to the principles of morality; b) exploitation in an activity contrary to the principles of morality; 16

IV. Deprived of legal representation or assistance, due to the possible lack of parental responsibility; V. Engaging in deviant behaviour by reason of serious family or community maladjustment; VI. Perpetrators of a criminal offence. (Law Nº 6,697/79, Juvenile Code)

The juvenile judge also acted on customary policy, establishing prohibitions on the attendance of children and adolescents to shows, performances, gambling houses, etc. The targets of the provisions contained in ‘minorist’ legislation were only certain children and adolescents: only those encapsulated within the hypothesis of an irregular situation – the object, therefore, of judicial intervention.

Law No. 6,697/79 emerged at a time when Brazilian society, and especially the majority of people who acted on behalf of children, understood that the model adopted in the country to care for children had only led to failure after failure, both in terms of the actions undertaken by the public authorities, where the state Foundations – FEBEMs – constituted the ‘star product’, as well as in the actions undertaken by Civil Society Organizations, imbued by ‘welfare philanthropy’. Thus, during its term of validity, the Code was more the object of criticism and rejection than of support and alignment by all of society’s institutions and initiatives.

Thus, ‘minorism’ in Brazil was invaded by innumerable initiatives that sought to establish other parameters of care and protection for children and adolescents. Of particular note were projects such as ‘Alternatives for the care of street children’ – whose mobilization process gave rise to an Organization: the

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National Movement of Street Children; Children’s Homes, with the intention of redesigning the shelter model for children and adolescents in small units; Youth Republics, as a strategy to remove girls and boys from the streets of large cities.

All of the initiatives during that period were informed by the ten points enshrined in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1959, which were the basis for discussions on what was to become the Convention, in 1989. Thus, we may infer that the period of validity of the last Juvenile Code (ten years) was a period of effervescence involving its rejection, with the maturation of the Doctrine of Comprehensive Protection.

Until that period, private and public actions to care for children in Brazil were underpinned by a welfare-based bias of a purely compensatory nature. There was no national policy, nor was there any integrated action.

A path towards the new Social, political and economic issues widely observed by various segments involved in the care of young children led to the organization of a process of mobilization of public and social institutions with a view to guaranteeing in the new Federal Constitution being drafted, the comprehensive protection of the human rights of all children and adolescents, led by the National Child and Constituent Movement.

The concept of children and adolescents as holders of fundamental rights was established at the start of article 227 of our Federal Constitution (CF), which should be understood in its historical value by reading its preamble: Art. 227. It is the duty of the family, society and the State to ensure children, adolescents and youth, with absolute 18

priority, the right to life, health, nourishment, education, leisure, professional training, culture, dignity, respect, freedom and family and community life, as well as to safeguard them from all forms of neglect, discrimination, exploitation, violence, cruelty and oppression. (Wording of Constitutional Amendment n.Âş 65 of 2010).

This historic achievement was followed by various initiatives aiming at the regulation of article 227, and brought together public agents/servants, liberal professionals, educators, judges, prosecutors, defenders, religious leaders, and international organizations in a great national crusade for the drafting of the Legal Framework on the Rights of the Child and Adolescent, inspired by the outcome of the discussions that would give rise to the text of the 1989 International Convention.

And on 13 July 1990, this legal framework was unanimously adopted by the National Congress, becoming Law No. 8,069 – the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ENA for its acronym in Portuguese). With regard to its functionality, over the course of these thirty years of its validity, the ENA required some alterations in order to bring it into line with an appropriate detailing of its norms, with a view to expanding its capacity to induce the alteration of the reality experienced by children and adolescents.

These changes include the law on the right to family and community life, also known as the law on adoption, the legal framework for early childhood, the law against abuse and the national socio-educational system. These initiatives by institutions, social and professional segments have gradually paved the way for the development of a past marked by value, respect and equal rights and the social and economic importance of child citizens. The development of this well-structured path is an enormous challenge and has been gradual.

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Taking into account the constitutional principle of absolute priority, the younger the age of the child, the higher the level of priority directed to meeting his or her needs and interests – fundamental rights, since it is precisely in the first years of a child’s life, depending on his or her natural conditions of physical, mental, biological and social limitations, that adults need to act in order to assert a child’s right to have rights. This concept is perfectly in line with the reflection that Antonio Carlos Gomes da Costa offered us in his text on the Service Policy, published on the Pro-Niño website in December 2012: Attending to the rights of children and adolescents should be addressed as an absolute priority, in view of the fact that: 1. they are not sufficiently aware of their rights; 2. they are unable to meet their basic needs on their own, 3. they are people in a particular condition of development, and, finally, 4. they have an intrinsic value (they are full human beings at any stage of their development) and a projective value (they are carriers of the future of their families, their peoples and the human species) (Costa, 2012).

An important statement that we always heard from that teacher at various times, is that the implementation of the Doctrine of Comprehensive Protection requires everyone – agents, social workers, educators, judicial authorities, defenders of the rights of children, and society as a whole – to make a definitive change in the way they ‘see, think and act’ towards a child, and what this demands of the measures taken by adults.

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The particular condition of children and adolescents as persons undergoing development ‘This phrase means that children and adolescents have all the rights held by adults, provided that they are applicable to their age, degree of physical or mental development and capacity for autonomy and discernment.’ 2 Antonio Carlos provides an explanation based on the knowledge produced by human and biological sciences regarding the condition of people in a state of physical, emotional, cognitive and sociocultural development who, therefore, do not possess the basic conditions to be responsible for compliance with the laws and other duties and obligations inherent to citizenship as adults. According to the author, when interpreting all the other articles of the statutory law, this principle should serve as a criterion: Article 6. The interpretation of this act shall take into account the social aims to which it is addressed, the requirements of the common good, individual and collective rights and duties, and the special status of children and adolescents as developing persons. (Statute of the Child and Adolescent, 1990).

Still with regard to that aspect, Seda (2018) states that ‘... any measure adopted in relation to this or that child, any collective work programme, any public policy formulated, must always, defending the child, also defend society.’

According to the author, this requirement is typical of citizenship, where asserting the interests of each also implies promoting the demand for the preservation of the common good, of the community.

2 Antonio Carlos Gomes da Costa, pedagogue, educator, member of the drafting committee of the Statute, quotation from the work ‘A condição peculiar da pessoa em desenvolvimento’, produced for the Fundação Telefônica Vivo site, 2 December 2016.

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The absolute priority of the rights of children and adolescents For many years, the absolute priority established in Arts. 227 of the CF and Art. 4 of the ENA was considered as a principle to give effect to the rights of the child and adolescent, and even after three decades it is still widely unknown by a large part of the population, and misunderstood and even opposed by others.

A new understanding has been brought about by actions undertaken, for example, by the Absolute Priority Programme of the Alana Institute, which disseminates the fact that this is not a principle, but a rule. It is also stressed that no other passage of the Federal Constitution refers to absolute priority. This view calls for a mobilization necessary to enforce our Citizens’ Constitution, which masterfully recognizes that nothing is more important for a nation than to care for children, adolescents and young people with absolute priority.

In addition, the absolute priority rule in the CF and the ENA, makes equal and names the persons who must comply with it: ... it is the duty of the family, (community), society, and in general of the public power to ensure with absolute priority that the rights become effective... A reading of the beginning of those two articles shows that there is no doubt that everyone, absolutely everyone, must guarantee with absolute priority that those rights are realized. It is the responsibility of all, a responsibility shared between the family, society and the State.

So, faced with a reality replete with traditions that are organized perversely (contrary to the right side), and the prevailing absolutism of the old priorities, what to do? The answer requires resorting to the triad highlighted by Antonio Carlos Gomes: it is necessary to promote changes in the way we see, think and act, in relation to children. It is not impossible, 22

although unlikely, that action can be taken by prioritizing the realization of the rights of girls and boys by acting under the aegis of those traditions that fail to recognize the human value and the special, peculiar and unique status of people in that age group.

Continuing to pursue legal opinions, it is necessary to acknowledge the breadth established in the legislation regarding what is covered by the rule of absolute priority. This is stated in Article 4 of the ENA: Single paragraph. The assurance of priority includes: a) the primacy of receiving protection and assistance in any circumstances; b) precedence of care in public services or of public significance; c) preference in the design and implementation of social public policies; d) privileged allocation of public resources in areas related to the protection of children and young people (Brazil, 1990).

So? If we take into account what science and good public policy practice have produced in Brazil and in the world, as soon as life emerges – a child – the best that public power and society can provide must be reserved for it, in order to ensure its full development. Thus, although there is no hierarchy in the allocation of resources for the realization of citizenship for this broad age group that covers girls, boys and adolescents, it is true that the sooner the full range of their rights, demands and needs can be met, the less will be the need for compensation in the years to come.

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The best interest of the child This landmark criterion is not explicit in the Federal Constitution or in the Statute of the Child and Adolescent, although it is clearly supported by the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by Brazil with the enactment of Legislative Decree No. 99,710/90. The Decree transforms all of the principles and articles of the Convention into a legal norm, and thus, that expression is tacit: “Art. 3.1 - In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration” (UN).

For Gonçalves (2020) there remains, therefore, the need to define the exact meaning of best interest, which is not easy to apprehend and is subject to controversial interpretations.

However, the CF and the ENA guarantee children’s right to liberty, respect and dignity, as well as guaranteeing the right to participation, to be heard in situations involving them and in possible conflicts of interest.

Criminal and civil minority, and the absence of a condition defending their interests administratively or judicially, do not nullify the right of children and adolescents to express themselves in any situation, administrative or judicial, that refers to their rights.

In this context, the participation of children and adolescents in the decision-making process on their best interests is deemed to be essential and mandatory, in compliance with the values affirmed by the legislator and, in particular, for the materialization of the dignity that is realized in the conception of children as holders of rights, and not only as objects of protection (Gonçalves, 2020).

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This right, criterion and condition of effectiveness are even more highly detailed in the Early Childhood Legal Framework, when in its article 4 it specifies that we must be alert to the best interests of children, and to their status as holders of rights and citizens, and include their participation in determining actions that concern them, in accordance with their age and developmental characteristics. This is the way to ‘promote their social inclusion as citizens’, recognizing that the participation of children, and that they be heard, require the intervention of qualified professionals experienced in listening procedures appropriate to the different forms of child expression (Law No. 13, 257/2016).

Responsabiliy After reviewing all of this information, with a high degree of consistency from a normative and doctrinal point of view, we can pause to reflect on the effects of these achievements on Brazilian reality, pose some questions and, before looking for the answers in the text, ask ourselves: What is my perception of these individuals we call girls or boys? What behaviours, attitudes, and disposition does my behaviour reveal to those individuals? How have I perceived my responsibility regarding the reality that is offered to them on a daily basis?

So? What conclusions have we reached?

It is true that laws, norms and rules, in themselves, do not alter reality if they are not put to daily use. This requires an internal change that ranges from the particular/individual to the general/collective. It requires acceptance and recognition of the way in which we have acted in the particular and in general and, further, the perception that we do so under the cloak/ influences of old traditions – those that ignore the conditions of equality, respect and dignity that children bear naturally in their existence.

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Antonio José Ángelo Motti He graduated as a PSYCHOLOGIST from the Don Bosco Catholic University, UCDB (1980).

Postgraduate specialization in Social Psychology (1990). Master’s degree in Education from the UFMS (2019). He has experience in the area of psychology, with an emphasis on Social Roles and Structures; Individual. He has been active in university extension since 1996 at the UFMS, where he has devised, created and coordinated the Council Schools Programme, first of its kind in Brazil. He served as Manager of the Programme to Combat Abuse and Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents from 2000 to 2002, within the Secretariat of State for Social Welfare of the Ministry of Social Security and Welfare, where he headed the creation and implementation of the Centinela Reference Centres, now CREAS. Since 2002, he has been involved in developing methodologies for integrating and improving public policies, and in training members of social control bodies through the actions carried out under the Council Schools Programme. From 2008 to 2013, he was the General Coordinator of the process to Implement the Regional Network to Combat the Smuggling of Children and Adolescents for the Purposes of Sexual Exploitation in Border Regions, developed within the framework of the WG Niñosur, Mercosur with IDB resources, involving 15 twin cities in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. He acted as the UFMS People Management Pro-Rector from 2016 to 2018. In 2017 he was appointed to represent the UFMS within the Union of Bioceanic Route Universities (UniRILA) and also within the Zicosur University Network, roles that he served in until he retired in September 2019. Currently, as a volunteer member of the Council Schools Programme, he is part of the UFMS researchers group at UniRILA and coordinates the team of researchers and specialists of the UEMS, UFMS and UCDB, acting in support of the preparation of the Master Plan for the City of Porto Murtinho - MS. In June 2020, he was appointed to a Senior Management and Advisory role at the Sports and Leisure Foundation of the Government of the State of Mato Grosso do Sul. Campo Grande - MSwww.ufms.br

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In order for the new to be established as real, several transformations are necessary, starting with the perception that what we had must be altered, and that what is available is instruments/tools for the construction of the new. So? Do we build the new – the new reality of children’s citizenship – using the old traditions or do we introduce new traditions? We have even perceived that with the advent of constitutional duty, some traditions have been developed that point towards the denial of responsibility, giving rise to the so-called ‘routing’, that is, the old and well-known transfer of responsibility.

References Brasil.cFederal Constitution, 4 October 1988. Retrieved from http://www. planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/constituicao.htm (09/16/2020) Brasil. Law 8069/90 - Statute of the Child and Adolescent. 13 July 1990. http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/l8069.htm (09/16/2020) Brasil. Law No. 6,697 of 10 October 1979. Juvenile Code http://www.planalto. gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/1970-1979/L6697impressao.htm (09/16/2020) Del Priori, M. História da criança no Brasil. In Edson Passeti. As crianças brasileiras: um pouco de sua história. Mimeographed text [S.I: s.n].

Gomes da C., A.C. A condição peculiar da pessoa em desenvolvimento, Fundação Telefônica Vivo. http://fundacaotelefonicavivo.org.br/ promenino/trabalhoinfantil/colunistas/a-condicao-peculiar-da-pessoaem-desenvolvimento (15/09/2020).

Gonçalves, C. de J. Breves Considerações sobre o Princípio do Melhor Interesse da Criança e do Adolescente. Retrieved from http://www. editoramagister.com/doutrina_23385195_BREVES_CONSIDERACOES_ SOBRE_O_PRINCIPIO_DO_MELHOR_INTERESSE_DA_CRIANCA_E_DO_ ADOLESCENTE.aspx (16/09/2020).

Neto, J. C. (2000). História da Criança e do Adolescente no Brasil. Revista Unifeo, revista semestral del Centro Universitario FIEO, year 2, (3).

Sêda, E. (1993). Construir o passado ou como mudar hábitos, usos e costumes tendo como instrumento o Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente.

São Paulo, Brasil: Malheiros.

UNICEF. The International Convention on the Rights of the Child. Retrieved from https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx (16/09/2020).

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Successes and failures in the exercise of the right of the child1 to be heard in judicial settings

By Natalia Smith

The right of the child to be heard is provided for in article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted in 1989), which revolves around the following general guidelines: • All children have the capacity to form their own opinion (according to their age – from early childhood – and degree of maturity) so that they can express their opinion freely in all matters affecting them.

• To that end, they should be given the opportunity to be heard in any judicial or administrative proceedings affecting them.

The intention of the CRC to position children as rights holders in this way, through the exercise of their progressive autonomy, is clear. This marks a before and after in our outlook of children, which goes from the paradigm of incompleteness and disability to the paradigm of the progressive exercise of rights according to the degree of maturity of the child, his or her age and other circumstances of life.

1 Hereinafter, when mentioning “Rights of the Child” [in the original in Spanish, “Derecho del Niño”] the reference is assumed to be to the rights of all children [in Spanish “niño” can refer to all children or only to boys. Therefore, the more inclusive NNyA - niño, niña y adolescente is often used].

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The Committee on the Rights of the Child identifies this article as one of the four general principles of the Convention, together with non-discrimination, the right to life and development, and the primary consideration of the best interests of the child.

This right must be guaranteed by States parties, so that children can express themselves on their own, or through an appropriate representative or body, in accordance with the procedural rules of National Law. Consequently, countless actions and measures have been taken since that time, in order to put this right into practice for children.

Not all States and territories have been able to advance equally promptly and effectively in the development of instruments and devices to ensure the applicability of listening to children.

This is because institutional and governmental inertia prevents and hinders the participation of children as genuinely active individuals in judicial or administrative processes that affect them. This leads to the deployment of an instrumental victimization, which reinforces the idea and representation of children who must be protected as long as the authorities and adultcentric outlooks so determine.

In addition, “negative and non-child-friendly” methods and procedures have been developed for childhood, which result in collateral damage in the face of revictimized subjectivity. It is at this point that I would like to stop and think, and compile those “bad practices” I have observed during my years of practising my profession as a psychologist in the judicial field.

These difficulties not only hinder the true exercise of the right to be heard, but also constitute a renewed violation of those who are vulnerable: children, especially those who are marginalized, economically and culturally disadvantaged, excluded, and historically oppressed. At times, it is nothing more than a new area that ensures the silence, anomie and disparagement with which they have been burdened for so long.

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Forensic Psychology – Testimonial Psychology, common contributions and errors Within the fields of application of Forensic Psychology, Experimental Forensic Psychology deals with the obtaining of evidence, and the evaluation of its credibility. In cases such as domestic violence, the assistance of the Forensic Psychologist is usually requested in obtaining the testimony of child victims and/or witnesses of violence.

In its paragraph 34 of General Comment No. 12, the Committee on the Rights of the Child (2009) states: “A child cannot be heard effectively where the environment is intimidating, hostile, insensitive or inappropriate for her or his age. Proceedings must be both accessible and childappropriate. Particular attention needs to be paid to the provision and delivery of child-friendly information, adequate support for self-advocacy, appropriately trained staff, design of court rooms, clothing of judges and lawyers, sight screens, and separate waiting rooms� (p. 9).

The use of a Gesell Chamber as a device for collecting information through a tele-recorded interview conducted by a psychologist has allowed many child victims of violence, and/ or witnesses of violence, to avoid going through various judicial and police interrogations over and over again, as well as proving beneficial in relation to the time and speed with which the evidence is collected, avoiding the flaws and risks resulting from the passage of time. At the same time, it constitutes advance evidence, preventing the children from having to repeat their statement years later before a court and their aggressor. A whole range of victim assistance has been developed to provide the best and earliest access to justice, which provides victims with knowledge of their rights and guidance in the judicial process.

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However, not everything is perfect, and interruptions do arise in the legal process, which is not entirely adapted to the presence of victims in cases, despite the progress and changes in both criminal and civil codes that have taken place in recent years. As Dr Del Popolo mentioned some time ago (1996) there is still a tendency to repeat interrogations (now referred to as testimonial declaratory interviews) and to conduct them in a manner that is not age-appropriate, as to both language and the setting where they take place; long hearings or postponement of hearings; confrontation with the accused (although currently, so-called face-to-face confrontations are disallowed, often not enough care is taken to prevent the parties from coming across each other in corridors, or in courtrooms, and they are even taken from one place to another in the same police vehicle, due to the lack of financial and material resources available to the poorest sectors; etc.).

Another important aspect, regarding which considerable progress has been made, is the consensus reached by most of the courts of justice, regarding who is the most appropriate person to carry out the task of receiving the accounts of the victims of crimes, whether direct victims or witnesses. On this point, the vast majority of States propose psychology practitioners, or experts specifically trained in taking single, declarative interviews for research purposes. In these cases, the most commonly used technique today is the Cognitive Interview (CI). This method was developed as a full procedure for taking statements, and its objective is to obtain quantitative and qualitative information, which is intended to be superior to that which can be obtained through standard interviews, reducing the possibility of errors of omission and commission in witness statements.

There are three steps in a CI: 1) creating an enabling environment, 2) free recall, and 3) applying memory recovery techniques:

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re-establishment of context, memory targeting and extensive recovery techniques (Manzanero, A., 2009).

A study of the credibility of the evidence is also added, taking into account some elements to aid such research: studies of physiological changes, behavioural investigations of body changes (non-verbal credibility factors) and analysis of verbal content. The first two focus on attempting to detect lies.

Can children choose not to exercise this right of their own free will?

The Committee on the Rights of the Child (2009) notes that the child has the right not to exercise this right, as it is an option, not an obligation, for the child to express his or her views.

States parties must ensure that the child receives all necessary information and advice to make a decision in favour of her or his best interests. It is hoped, thereby, that the child will be able to understand the basics of the issues that affect him/her and thus generate his/her own opinion of these issues. At the same time, children’s levels of understanding are not uniformly linked to their biological age. Information, experience, the environment, social and cultural expectations, and levels of support all contribute to the development of a child’s capacity to form a view. For this reason, children’s opinions should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

As we saw earlier, more than 30 years after the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, there are still obstacles to the enjoyment of the right to be heard; as well as some ignorance or abuse of authority, which highlights the non-observance of the right to exercise this right. This usually happens when a child remains silent, refuses or does not want to testify, or when he/ she is made to undergo repeated interrogations, mostly when 32

some of the parties are not satisfied with his/her statements, or they seem insufficient, or biased, or manipulated by a third adult for their convenience. Prosecutors and judicial authorities often request more than one declarative instance when children fail to provide enough evidence, or when their statement is contradictory, or when they simply decide not to provide any data on the case.

This dialectical struggle in the reconstruction of the truth, infringes children’s rights and invades their privacy. They shift from being holders of rights to being the object of the right.

Objectifying their statements, their testimony, in order to obtain evidence, is one of the most infamous acts of violation of alleged access to justice.

Declarative interviews are intended to produce evidence, but without first evaluating whether it really helps children to improve their living conditions. To expose children to a judicial act when they themselves are not prepared, do not understand, or simply do not wish to participate in the process, results in undermining subjectivity, as it would if it were otherwise; that is, when children need a process and the State cannot guarantee it.

Traumatogenic vision of justice It is true that the act of listening to a child in a court setting can be traumatic if the necessary conditions are in place for it to be so, but there is a whole representation of judicial operations as being stressful and negative events for children, and it is preferred to bring children in as witnesses as little as possible, and if possible, leave them out of adult conflicts, considering that these do not concern or affect their lives.

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I am referring here to the tendency of some judges, mainly family judges or judges dealing with violence, to involve children as little as possible in their parents’ court cases, especially when it comes to domestic or gender-based violence. This is how children become invisible victims (del Prado Ordoñez Fernández and González Sánchez, 2012) of violence experienced as witnesses, indirectly, or directly. Listening to children is avoided in order to protect them from the harmful effects of the prosecution of behaviours, while trying to alter their living conditions as little as possible, in their “best interest”, namely: to continue communicating with their parents, ensuring contact and filial ties, all without assessing the quality of these contacts and bonds and the effects on children’s personality of continuing their links with a violent or negligent adult. There is a tendency here to ensure the interests of others (parents, adoptive families, judicial authorities, etc.) and not those of the child.

It is essential to listen to children in these instances where violence operates as a family organizer. That their opinion be taken into account, inasmuch as they are part of that dysfunctional family unit. Listening without questioning or imposing. It is common to hear court officials ask children with whom they want to live. Once the bond is dissolved by judicial coercion, the idea of family dismemberment and an urgent decision to position themselves on one side or another are imposed on children. It is also very common for this to happen to children who have been excluded from their home for shelter and protection, and in this state of abandonment, they are offered an alternative family to their family of origin, without considering identity as a process, one that is challenged by an abrupt dissociation with their family of origin, and by the need imposed under the assumption of best interest for an urgent link with an alternative or adoptive family in the best of cases.

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Finally, I will cite the analysis of a sentence relating to the filiation of a girl from the city of Tucumán, which attempts to be an example of a careful and conscious judicial listening of the child, under the guidelines observed in this list of precepts and recommendations that we have mentioned. In the following case, the guarantee that the girl has the right to be Heard is reflected in her full participation in the judicial process, which clearly affected her identity and, therefore, all spheres of her life. This participation shows that it was possible to take into account the views of the child with regard to her interests, and in that respect, it was possible to decide with a rightsbased perspective, with a democratic outlook adjusted to her reality. In addition, we note the much-needed adjustment of judicial communications on the consequences of the child’s participation in the process.

In its section “opinion articles”, the publishing house Erreius (2020) presents an analysis of this case: A Tucumán magistrate handed down a judgement in language understandable to a nine-year-old girl, in a case in which custody was being debated between a man who recognized the girl as his daughter and the biological father.

The ruling was written in response to a lawsuit filed by Roberto, Juli’s biological, but unregistered father, who was asking to be recognized as her parent. But, in addition, the claim had a second objective: to challenge the paternal filiation of Jorge, the former partner of the girl’s mother, who had adopted Juli as his own.

The girl asked “not to give up either of her dads” and Judge Mariana Rey Galindo, of the Family and Succession Court of Monteros Judicial Centre, recognized the triple filiation of the nine-year-old girl.

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“Juli, you’re right,” the magistrate said in her decision, in which she addressed the girl in accessible language and using a special typeface.

“In order to give a legal solution to this case, we not only had to look beyond appearance, but we also had to get rid of our prejudices and stereotypes to really connect with the people involved in this story,” Judge Galindo said.

The magistrate’s arguments Juli – not her real name, to protect the child’s identity – is a 9-year-old girl living in Amaicha del Valle, in Tucumán, Argentina.

She begins fourth grade this year. “She enjoys maths and wants to be a teacher when she grows up. During the week she lives with her father Jorge, her 11-year-old sister Nair, and her aunt Hilda. On weekends she lives with her father Roberto and her sister Hade. Juli’s mother is called Lucía and she lives elsewhere.

There, at her mother’s house, she also has two younger siblings.

They are called Ludmi and Nico,” is reported in the introduction to the case.

When the matter was resolved, Rey Galindo explained to the girl that she would legally recognize her right to have her fathers recorded on her papers and also her right to live in that way and with her family.

“This means that I am going to have the State register Roberto in your birth certificate, in addition to Jorge and Lucía. The three of them: as a result, you will have two fathers and one mother on paper (records). And this means that the three of them have the same rights and obligations,” she observed.

In that regard, she emphasized to the girl that “basically, the obligations of the three of them are: to take care of you, 36

accompany you in life and ensure your physical and economic well-being (food, housing, schooling, etc.). Among them they must organize themselves to take care of you, such as issuing your authorizations when you leave the country, or

Natalia Smith She holds a degree in Psychology from the Catholic University of Santiago del Estero, Argentina. She has trained as a Psychodramatist for five years, preparing her degree thesis on the legal issues of Children and the Family, mainly in Domestic Violence and Abuse. Her legal training is based on child-youth issues using the Human Rights paradigm as its focus. She has also trained as a sociotherapeutic operator for addictions, exercising a community and clinical approach to this issue. Her postgraduate degrees include: Diploma in Legal and Forensic Psychology; Diploma in Cognitive Neuroscience applied to the forensic field. She is currently pursuing a specialization in Legal Psychology at the National University of Cรณrdoba, Argentina.

She has served in the judicial field since 2005; among her main roles, she served as a psychologist on the Interdisciplinary Adoption Team for the Single Registry of Applicants for Guardianship with a view to Adoption; then as a forensic psychologist at the Office of Forensic Psychology, and is currently a member of the Interdisciplinary Team of the Gender Court, all under the orbit of the Judiciary of the province of Santiago del Estero, Argentina. She is a higher-level teacher and trainer in various vocational training fields. Director of the Institute for Study and Research in Legal Psychology and Human Rights, part of the Argentine chapter of the Latin American Network for the Study and Research of Human and Humanitarian Rights.

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if you decide to marry before the age of 18, their rights of communication with you, personal care and such things, you know?”

Finally, the magistrate said to the girl: “I would like to invite you back to talk to me, since this decision is the result of having listened to you, when you made that request that was so important to you, and that is why this is also a very important answer. To do this you can come to the Court here in Monteros any day in the morning or, if you want, you let me know and I can go to Amaicha, so I can explain everything that is written here, and you can tell me what you think about it, I shall also invite your parents so that I can personally explain to them what this decision means. Another option is that you can call me on my mobile phone.”

“Juli, you’re right when you say you don’t want to choose between your two dads. You have the right to keep them both, Dad Roberto and Daddy Jorge. You are also right not to allow the grown-ups – and I admire your great courage in this – to demand that kind of choice from you. There’s nothing to choose.

You don’t have to choose between Jorge and Roberto. Because, according to what we talked about and you told me about, you feel that they are both your dads. Fine, that is the important thing. And that is what I am going to write in this judgement,” the decision ruled.

Reflections Attentive and compassionate listening ensures the participation of subjectivity in the evolution of events. “Failure to guarantee Listening to children in the judicial sphere indicates a clearly iatrogenic effect in the Judicial System towards the Human Rights of the Child” (words from the resonating dialogues of

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a friend and reference point on the subject, Lic. Ada Fragosa).

Listening ensures active and subjective participation, the authorizing force of a singular history, although not individual, the product of a social being, which tries to remain linked to the restraint of a humanity that includes it without minimizing, that judges without objectifying. Listening allows us to question those acts that are devoid of meaning without the word.

Justice and its clinical function. Who truly listens to a child, listens to a life, but even more, listens to its power, to what is to come, that which deserves to be watered, minted, protected, under the precept that the essential is invisible to the eye.

Bibliography Committee on the Rights of the Child, C. D. (2009). CRC/C/GC/12. Geneva.

Del Popolo, J. H. (1996). Psicología Judicial. Mendoza, Argentina: Ediciones Jurídicas Cuyo.

Del Prado, M., & González, P. (2012). Las víctimas invisibles de la violencia de Género. Revista Clínica de Medicina de Familia, 5(1), 30-36. Retrieved from https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=1696/169624100006 [8/8/2020].

Erreius, E. (19 February 2020). Erreius. Retrieved from www.erreius.com [8/8/2020].

Manzanero, A. (2009). Psicología Forense: Definición y Técnicas. In J. Collado Medina, Teoría y Práctica de la Investigación Criminal (pp. 313 - 339).

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A discursive construction of childhood

By Mag. Beatriz Liberman Jablonsky

Introduction1 Statements about children that have evolved through political and disciplinary discourse, embodied in areas including the various educational, health and legal systems, account for the sensitivities and senses that children have historically acquired as social, cultural, and political constructions. At the same time, childhood is conceived as the result of a historical and social process, in which ways of treating, naming, studying, and defining the condition of the child are produced and reproduced, supported by conceptions, meanings, positioning, theoretical references, and paradigms.

The purpose of this article is to present different attributes and parameters that particularize and characterize children, the foundation of childhood as a modern social category. On the 1 This article is the result of a study carried out within the framework of the final thesis, Construcción discursiva de la niñez en la educación, rupturas y continuidades histórico-sociales [“The discursive construction of childhood in education. Rifts and historical-social continuities”], for a master’s degree in Child Rights and Public Policy, coordinated by the Faculties of Law, Social Sciences, Medicine and Psychology of the University of the Republic, Uruguay, 2019.

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basis of which, to account for the discursive construction of childhood in its different and peculiar facets that make up and compose the social institution of childhood.

The arguments presented are the result of a study carried out within the framework of a master’s degree thesis written by the author, entitled Construcción discursiva de la niñez en la educación, rupturas y continuidades histórico-sociales [The discursive construction of childhood in education; rifts and historical-social continuities]. The aim of this research was to delve into constructions relating to children and the practices associated with them, which were present in Uruguayan education in the period covering 1985-2004, with the intention of shedding light and expanding on the issue of continuities and ruptures in relation to the category of modern childhood.

The emergence of a particularized childhood The relationships that social groups have maintained with their offspring has varied throughout history. While small biological bodies, or “human cubs”, have always existed, they did not always embody boys and girls. In his work, Philippe Ariès (1987) refers to the fact that there has not always been an appreciation of the particularity of children, that is, a feeling of childhood that distinguished boys and girls from adults. For the French historian, there was a shift from a feeling of indifference towards children to a feeling of childhood as a modern social and historical construct. This invention or particularization takes place in a context of transcendent historical, social, and political transformations that Western Europe is undergoing.

The emergence and consolidation of childhood as a modern social category is the result of a slow process of transformation affecting the practices, feelings, and discourse of adults in relation to the new generations. As well as institutions,

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areas of knowledge, and professions dealing with children.

The meanings characteristic of childhood, as an invention, are the result of a socio-historical process that emerges and consolidates childhood as a social category, inasmuch as it is a symbolic, imaginary, and practical production as regards these newcomers, in relation to a biological body and its offspring.

This construction has not been free from conflict and tension; as Sandra Carli (1999) argues, “the history of childhood is traversed by political struggles, ideologies, and economic changes, just like any other object of historiographical interpretation” (p. 21).

Practices linked to children produced the meanings with which modernity deals with, educates, and produces children (Corea and Lewkowicz, 1999). Practical hegemonic operations symbolically institute childhood through the bourgeois family unit and the school apparatus. In this way, the practical operations instituted result in the passage from the biological body of the child, to the child as a social subject. Indeed, childhood exists due to the practical intervention of the various modern institutions of protection, guardianship, assistance, literacy, and socialization (Corea and Lewkowicz, 1999). These practical operations on this biological body of the child, and their arguments, produce a “docile”, “innocent”, “fragile”, and “project of what will be” childhood; ways of inhabiting and incarnating childhood, that is, of becoming boys and girls.

For Corea and Lewkowicz (1999), childhood is the historical result of State-promoted practices that position the family as executor. For these authors, the practices that institute childhood are: the conservation of children, social hygiene, philanthropy, and control of the population, so that the place of the family becomes a privileged area for the protection and containment of children (p. 13). Thus, childhood is “a set of meanings that bourgeois State practices instituted upon the body [of the ‘human’ offspring]” (Corea and Lewkowicz, 1999: 42

13). Children are constituted as such in their transit through that time of being a child that modernity has called childhood.

The time of childhood is a period constructed within the fabric of a society and a culture that give meaning to that biological moment of bodies (Carli, 2003: 14).

Also substantial in the historical construction of modern childhood are the practices promoted by the State in public schools, in the case of normal and regular boys and girls, or in courts and special care institutions for irregular and abnormal minors.

The particularization of childhood implies a discourse prescribing a socially expected statute and model of childhood.

This discourse is instituted, fundamentally, by means of knowledge linked to the legal, educational, psychological, and medical-paediatric fields. At the same time, it is possible to argue that the perspectives from which modern childhood has been conceived are marked by certain philosophical, ontological, and epistemological traditions and positions. From this knowledge and this positioning, a normality and a “must be” is crystallized for the first period of human life. Issues that determine the historical conditions of their existence (Foucault, 2002), concrete material practices for children and ways of conceiving and dealing with children.

Discourse gives an account of how children are conceived and dealt with, it “talks” about what is “done”, how it is “done” and why it is “done”. Concrete material practices are consistent with the process of social production related to children and embody the particularization of children in their different and particular facets as objects of the social institution of childhood. In this way, the meanings that characterize children underpin the practices that modernity uses to deal with, educate, and produce children. At the same time, it establishes the links between cross-generational relations and the social space devoted to 43

childhood, the ways in which adults conceive of children and the perceptions that children have about themselves.

Practices and discourse related to childhood According to the study mentioned above, different discourses emerge regarding the way that children are perceived and treated. Each of these discourses is constructed on the basis of specific material practices related to the way children are treated, which delimit an identity and the persistence of a theme such as: object of care, object of training, social object, and object of public property. From this type of discourse, it is possible to compose representations that crystallize constructions strongly related to the attributes of modern childhood, as a social, historical, and political category.

It is possible to argue that historically, childhood (Carli, 1999) has been constructed through essentialist arguments, produced on the basis of the paradigms of liberalism, illuminism, and positivism. Childhood is thus established from an adultcentric perspective (García Méndez, 1991), as the negation of adulthood, as an ontological datum, of universal, ahistorical, and masculine validity. There is a universe of subjects, children, who are characterized and discriminated against based on their status as “newcomers”.

From an adult-centric perspective (García Méndez, 1991) and through illuminist positions, a childhood minority has developed based on age and lack of reason. Historically, childhood has been linked to a time of preparation and transition to adulthood.

Thus, discourse has constituted childhood in association with an initial prematurity, incomplete and unfinished, and, at the same time, marked by an initial helplessness.

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These representations involve a perspective regarding the young of the human species as a carrier of a subsequent maturity, which is achieved after a laborious process of evolution and development of its “human” aspects, involving the genetic apparatus of the child, the family, and school. In this sense, hand in hand with family privatization and State schooling, from an unfinished condition and as citizens of tomorrow, children await the future; in one, shaped as a son or daughter and in the other, as a student. Located in the position of an object of formation, the human cub and age-related barbarian (Barrán, 2008) goes through a process of humanization and formation of citizenship, normalization and civilization, in a transition towards social inclusion and becoming an adult. In this way, children achieve full development and adult completeness.

Throughout this process, children “grow”, become useful individuals, accede to reason, channel their behaviours, incorporate into their identity the collective morality and civic values of society, on the basis of which they are able to know, achieve righteousness, conscience, and free will. These aspects enable their social integration, to inhabit and be part of the collective, achieve a state of consciousness and intentionality and the consequent autonomy.

Given the specific and essential condition of children’s initial “prematurity”, specialized interventions are directed at them that address their incompleteness, helplessness, weakness, and fragility. Based on these attributes, and as a counterpart, children are perceived to be in need of protection, unable to exercise autonomy and govern themselves, emotionally dependent and irresponsible in their exchanges.

Children are not prepared to “face” life, so it is inevitable to subject them to special treatment that responds to the needs arising from their unfinished condition and incapacity at the start of life; they require guardianship, as they are not themselves 45

“able”; protection, because of their fragility, and education, because of their innocence. Thus, before entering the adult world, they exist in a kind of quarantine (Ariès, 1987), they are withdrawn to the privacy of a family and public schooling.

They are instituted as the object of care, based on their deficitrelated needs.

The family, together with the school, constitute a “blockade” (Donzelot, 1979) around children, so that they can be cared for, sheltered, and protected, while disciplining, completing, preparing and instructing them for their entry into the adult world; in short, their life is regulated, and their individuation, citizenship and social normalization occurs (Foucault, 2006).

Within these restraints, attention, affections and interest in children materialize, accompanied by control and vigilance, under which children grow and develop, prepare for the future, and discipline and regulate their lives.

In the face of social incapacity (García Méndez, 1994) and neglect, children are offered by institutions, social protection, shelter, assistance and leadership. Institutional discourse refers to their right to be assisted in order to “combat” children’s “characteristic” and individual shortcomings and adversities.

In this way, the State protects the future (Bustelo, 2007) through public policies and specific institutional interventions, particularly through schools. In this sense, a situation of subordination to adults is installed; “childcare and protection for children will develop at the cost of dependence, obedience, and submission of children with respect to adults” (Leopold, 2014: 30).

Society organizes individual and collective existence in a stratified manner, insofar as various social strata or levels are constructed, which differ from each other in their characteristics and that categorize different circumstances of life through which individuals pass (adult, girl, woman, son, student, schoolchild, 46

poor person, citizen). In this respect, reference is made to the fact that the existence of the child occurs in belonging or being affiliated to family groups, age segments, territorial enclaves, schooling and social class. On this basis, children are constituted as social subjects, inasmuch as they pass through different social positions in life: son, daughter, student, poor person, boy, girl, minor, inhabitant. Thus, differentiated positions are established between children and adults, which they occupy as sons, daughters, students and fathers-mothers, teachers, and which, with antagonistic criteria, make up pairs of opposites with opposing rationales (child-adult, child-minor, son, daughterparent, student-teacher).

According to the different disciplines that deal with child development, some of these social positions through which the child passes are prescriptively planned and ordered, while the “ways” of inhabiting them are also ordained. The specific and indisputable characteristics of childhood are presented through paediatrics, psychology, pedagogy, psychomotricity, and other fields. The different fields of knowledge posit certain physical, psychological, language, motor, and socialization characteristics and attributes according to “each” age. In this way, “normality” is described for the different age stages and population profiles of “boy”, “girl”, “daughter”, “son”, “schoolchild”.

Through this ideology of normality, based on any differences that are objectified as such, children are characterized and categorized in relation to what is familiar, educational, territorial, or belonging to a social class. As a result of this, it is possible to argue that the child population does not represent the universe of childhood, does not respond to one “universal” and involves a segmented population with specific profiles.

In this sense, we can point to childhood as a universe that is fundamentally divided into two models: a regular childhood and another, irregular childhood; minors. At the same time that 47

representations are composed around “normal” childhood, as an absence of adulthood; from the individual and privatizing position of its “origin”, constructions of an irregular and discordant childhood are installed; minors, an absence of adulthood, but also of normalized childhood. The latter denote discrepancies or shortcomings in relation to the “norm” and hegemonic models, the result of their conditions of existence, mainly due to the disorder of poverty. It is a “deficient identity” (Costa and Gagliano, 2000), with certain psychological, social, and learning handicaps as constitutive of individuals, while at the same time they are at social risk and in conditions of moral or material abandonment. For the former, protection, surveillance, education and socialization in families and schools; for the latter, socio-criminal surveillance and control, protective

Mag. Beatriz Liberman She graduated as a psychologist from the Institute of Psychology of the University of the Republic (1989), now Faculty of Psychology and holds a master’s degree in Child Rights and Public Policy, University of the Republic.She is also a socio-analyst, graduated from P.A.I.D.E.I.A. (Community, Group and Institutional Studies Analysis and Research Project) (1997). Institutional Analysis in Operational Groups.

Currently Director of the Social Education Training Institute, Education Training Council, National Public Education Administration (having successfully answered a competitive call to fill the role, 2015).

She advises work teams in the field of education. She has worked in non-governmental organizations as a psychologist.

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charity subject to the State. For both types of childhood, protection strongly linked to guidance and social control with differentiated interventions.

Childhood is identified with a time that is not yet, but that is characterized as the origin of a potential after-time (Korea and Lewkowicz, 2004). Therefore, childhood is associated with incompleteness, while bearing the future possibility of reaching adulthood.

In this way, as a counterpart, it is conceived as being in need of care and protection due to its initial lack and fragility, but also, for what is to be, in terms of a time of preparation for and investment in what is to come. Childhood is the transit period from a “natural state”, as a starting point, to reach the shape of an adult – a productive citizen – as a moment of completeness in which children reach the period of reason and intellect. In this respect, the family and the school bear the social responsibility of ensuring that the youngest members of society, as national heritage, reach the status of social and productive individuals, humanization and citizenship, in their transition to adulthood.

The period of childhood is marked by the preparation of “citizens of the future”, “men of tomorrow” and “heirs of the future”, responsible for their own future, the family’s and the nation’s (Leopold, 2014). Therefore, the shaping of tomorrow’s man, capable of building the future, is a task that requires conscientious and patient work with the child; of control, regulation and correction. Inasmuch as childhood implies the future, spending on children is an investment in human capital, a commitment to the future of society and individual and collective well-being.

The State, through the family and the school, cares for and protects children as a social heritage, because of their future status as active citizens; it protects and cares for the weak, those

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who are not yet, and human capital, for what they will be. As far as dealing with children, as a public asset object or a public “thing”, is concerned, it is a strategy to achieve the economic, social, political, and cultural development of the country.

This investment of resources in children is an accumulation of “human capital” that produces, as productive reserves for the society of the future, the adults necessary for growth and national productivity.

From these positions, children are constituted as a social asset, as an issue for the government – in Foucault’s sense, 2007 – and the jurisdiction of the State as future active citizens, from a liberal perspective. Childhood conceived as incomplete and barbaric (Varela, 1865, cited in Barrán, 2008), while in the process of growth and individualization, in its transition to adulthood, is subject to the practices of discipline, leading, control and regulation to achieve social subjection. At the same time, the family and schools are placed as instruments capable of governing the child population and producing their civilized humanization. There is no childhood if not for the practical intervention of families and schools with their technologies, which, together with a set of modern institutions for the protection, guardianship, and assistance of children, produce “a child” on biological bodies.

Final considerations The constructions developed as regards children give an account of the different and particular facets that make up the institution of childhood, as well as of the historical, social, and political implications of the childhood production process.

On the basis of what we have discussed in this article it is possible to argue that childhood, as a construction of a social category, implies a multiplicity of categories and fields of knowledge that converge in its formation. This multiplicity is an expression of 50

the dispersion and distribution of fragments of knowledge and practices, which, in their relationships and in a political, social, and historical context, make it possible for something to be said (Foucault, 2002), in this case, about childhood. From this it is possible to make more complex the study and understanding of the subject in question, bringing depth and asperity to delimited discourses, while accounting for the integration and synchronization of the different conceptual components and the field of knowledge that gives rise to the discursive plot, as a construction of meanings about childhood.

Finally, it should be noted that the socio-historical construction of childhood shows that it did not have the same meanings within the universe that includes the category of childhood. Guided by the ideas of Ana M. Fernández (1993b), the particularization of childhood did not involve all children in society in the same way; there were, rather, significant differences that remained invisible within the notion of childhood. For the author, this global notion of childhood invisibilizes the particularities involving social class, gender, ethnicity, and geopolitical and cultural factors, among others (p. 12). The semantic and social universe of childhood omits specificities, insofar as it usually takes a child as a model, but not just any child: a middle class, western, white child “...when in fact, the processes of socialization, as well as the construction of their subjectivities, and many of their practices display significant differences.

Differences of all kinds that remain invisible in the notion of childhood...” (p. 12).

Bibliography Agamben, G. (2007). Infancia e historia. Destrucción de la experiencia y origen de la historia. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Adriana Hidalgo Editora.

Ariès, P. (1987). El niño y la vida familiar en el antiguo régimen. Madrid: Taurus Ediciones.

Barrán, J. P. (1995). Medicina y sociedad en el Uruguay del Novecientos. La

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ortopedia de los pobres, tomo 2. Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental.

Barrán, J. P. (2008). Historia de la sensibilidad en el Uruguay. La cultura “bárbara”. El disciplinamiento. Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental.

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Carli, S. (comp.) (1999). De la familia a la escuela. Infancia, socialización y subjetividad. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Santillana.

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Corea, C. y Lewkowicz, I. (1999). Tres observaciones sobre el concepto de infancia. Ensayo sobre la destitución de la niñez. En ¿Se acabó la infancia?

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Corea, C. y Lewkowicz, I. (2004). Pedagogía del aburrido. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.

Costa, M. y Gagliano, R. (2000). Las infancias de la minoridad. Una mirada histórica desde las políticas públicas. En Duschatzky, S. (comp.), Tutelados y asistidos. Programas sociales, políticas públicas y subjetividad (pp. 69119). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.

De Marinis, P. (2002). Ciudad, “cuestión criminal” y gobierno de poblaciones.

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De Martino, M. (2009) (comp.). Infancia, familia y género. Múltiples problemáticas y múltiples abordajes. Montevideo, Uruguay: Cruz del Sur. Delgado, B. (1998). Historia de la infancia. Barcelona, España: Ariel.

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Dolto, F. (1993). La causa de los niños. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.

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Duschatzky, S. y Corea, C. (2002). Los caminos de la subjetividad en el declive de las instituciones. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.

Duschatzky, S. y Redondo, P. (2000). Las marcas del Plan Social Educativo o los indicios de ruptura de las políticas públicas. En Duschatzky, S. (comp.), Tutelados y asistidos. Programas sociales, políticas públicas y subjetividad (121-185). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.

Fernández, A. M. (1992). Las mujeres en la imaginación colectiva. Una historia de discriminación y resistencias. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.

Fernández, A. M. (1993b). La invención de la niña. Argentina: UNICEF-Xerox.

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Foucault, M. (1991). Vigilar y castigar. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo veintiuno editores.

Foucault, M. (2006). Seguridad, territorio, población. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Foucault, M. (2007). La gubernamentalidad. En Giorgi, G. y Rodríguez, F. (comps.), Ensayos sobre biopolítica. Excesos de vida (pp. 187-215). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.

García, E. (1991). Prehistoria e historia del control socio-penal de la infancia: política jurídica y derechos humanos en América Latina. Recuperado de: http://www.iin.oea.org/Cursos_a_distancia/ prehistoria_e_Historia_Control_Socio_penal.pdf (06/2016) García, E. (1994). Derecho de la infancia-adolescencia en América Latina: de la situación irregular a la protección integral. Bogotá: Ediciones Forum Pacis.

García, E. (1995). Introducción en derechos del niño. Políticas para la infancia.

UNICEF-Instituto Interamericano del Niño.

García, E. (2007). Prólogo. En Bustelo, E., El recreo de la infancia. Argumentos para otro comienzo. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo XXI. Giorgi, G. y Rodríguez, F. (comps.). Ensayos sobre biopolítica. Excesos de vida (187-215). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós.

Giorgi, V. (2002). Niños, adolescentes entre dos siglos. Algunas reflexiones acerca del escenario de nuestras prácticas. Ponencia presentada en XXIV Congreso Latinoamericano de Psicoanálisis. Montevideo, Uruguay: FEPAL.

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Leopold, S. (2002). Tratos y destratos. Políticas públicas de atención a la infancia en el Uruguay (1934- 1973). Recuperado de: http://www2. convivencia.edu.uy/web/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Tratados-yDestratados.pdf (05/2014) Leopold, S. (2014). Los laberintos de la infancia. Discursos, representaciones y crítica. Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones Universitarias.

Leopold, S. y Pedernera, L. (2009). Llover sobre mojado. Consideraciones sobre infancia y adolescencia en el Uruguay de hoy. En Mónica De Martino (comp.) Infancia, familia y género. Múltiples problemáticas, múltiples abordajes (pp. 97-110). Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones Cruz del Sur. Llobet, V. (2012). Políticas sociales y ciudadanía. Diálogos entre la teoría feminista y el campo de estudios de infancia. Frontera Norte, 24 (48), 7-36. Recuperado de: http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_ arttext&pid=S0187-73722012000200001&lng=es&tlng=es (07/2017) Minnicelli, M. (2004). Infancias públicas. No hay derecho. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Novedades Educativas.

Minnicelli, M. (2008). Infancia e institución(es): escrituras de la ley. Infancia e institución(es). En Minnicelli, M. (coord.), Escrituras de la ley en la cultura vs. maltrato y abuso infantil (pp. 13-43). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Novedades Educativas.

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Argentina: Libros del Zorzal.

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Escritura entre (dos) orillas (pp.103-122). Buenos Aires: Del Estante Editorial.

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Redondo, P. (2004). Escuelas y pobreza. Entre el desasosiego y la obstinación.

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(De)institutionalizing children.

Progress and challanges in the State of Mexico

By Luis PeĂąa Cruz

We are guilty of many mistakes and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning children by denying them the source of life. Many of the things that we need can wait; children cannot [‌].

Gabriela Mistral

Summary: I. The human right to a family life and (de) institutionalization II. Current situation of institutionalization in Mexico. III. Legal and institutional developments. IV. Current challenges in guaranteeing the right to family life and eradicating institutionalization.

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I. The human right to family life and (de) institutionalization The preamble to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereinafter referred to as the “Convention”) (1989) states that the family is fundamental for underage persons to achieve the full and harmonious development of their personality. However, the condition of living in a family is not sufficient in itself, but must be accompanied by an environment of respect, positive upbringing, understanding and affection. In addition, family life is an internationally and domestically recognized human right; this feature is fundamental, as it makes it interdependent on other rights,1 such as: (a) life, survival and development;2 (b) substantive equality;3 (c) non-discrimination;4 and (d) living in conditions of well-being that guarantee a healthy and comprehensive development5, to name a few.

The (in)adequate application of the restriction to the right to family life as a guideline for (de) institutionalization Under certain circumstances, the human right to live in a family may be restricted. This is no small thing, since the processes that restrict this right can cause serious effects on other types of rights. In order for State agents to be able to make this decision, they must comply with various procedural guarantees established in international and domestic legislation.

It follows from an interpretation of articles 9 of the Convention and 22 of the LGDNNA that the only way to separate children 1 For Vázquez and Serrano (2013), the principle of interdependence “indicates the extent to which the enjoyment of a particular right or group of rights depends on the realization of another right or group of rights” (p. 40).

2 Articles 6 of the Convention; and 14 and 15 of the Ley General de los Derechos de Niñas, Niños y Adolescentes [General Act on the Rights of Children and Adolescents] (hereinafter “LGDNNA”).

3 Articles 24 of the American Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter “ACHR”); and 36, 37, and 38 of the LGDNNA. 4 Articles 2 of the Convention; and 39, 40, and 41 of the LGDNNA. 5 Articles 43 and 44 of the LGDNNA.

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and adolescents from their families of origin is when such a decision is necessary to protect the best interests of children. In other words, family separation is only appropriate when minors are suffering, or are at risk of suffering, serious damage to their rights in their family unit of origin, as in cases of abandonment, negligent treatment or sexual violence. In addition, the international treaty on children states that the decision to separate them: (a) must be decreed by a competent authority, in strict accordance with the law and applicable procedures; (b) must be subject to judicial review immediately and periodically; and (c) must ensure that all parties concerned – primarily the children or adolescents – are able to participate and make their views known.

This has been reaffirmed by the jurisprudence of the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights (hereinafter “IACtHR”) in the case of Fornerón and daughter v. Argentina (2012), when it ruled that children and adolescents must remain with their families of origin, unless there are compelling reasons, based on the best interests of the child, that justify family separation. In that resolution, the IACtHR (2012) also noted that “separation should be exceptional and, preferably, temporary (para. 47)”.

However, when the State determines that children should be separated from their family setting of origin, they need to implement other measures in order to safeguard children’s rights. These measures include: (i) placement with the extended family; (ii) placement with a foster family as a temporary measure; (iii) adoption; and (iv) placement in residential care, provided by public or private social welfare centres. The last measure is known as “institutionalization” and is at the heart of the problem in family separation processes.

Here it is pertinent to note that the application of the measures available to States should not follow an indeterminate case-bycase method, but that there should be a hierarchical ranking to 58

determine their appropriateness. In other words, if the State has determined that a 5-year-old girl should be separated from her family because she is the victim of sexual abuse, what should first be sought is: (i) to place her with a member of her extended or wider family network; (ii) if this is not possible, the State should assign the girl to a foster family, certified and supervised by the State (iii) if the best interests of the girl justify not returning to the family of origin, the State should provide her with a definitive family through adoption; and (iv) only when none of the above options is compatible with the best interests of the child, the State may place the girl in the care of a public or private institution.

As long as States respect the hierarchical order of the measures mentioned above, as well as the principle of the best interests of the child, we shall prevent children and adolescents in the region from being institutionalized; in fact, the proper application of standards for the restriction of the right to family life will guarantee deinstitutionalization, understood from a preventive and non-repetitive approach. On the other hand, when States choose to institutionalize children and adolescents indiscriminately, there is clearly an inadequate application of the restriction of the right to family life; this reinforces the terrible phenomenon of institutionalization that is currently keeping millions of children and adolescents in confinement, growing up deprived of a family (UN, 2019, p. 10).

II. Current situation of institutionalization in Mexico In Mexico, institutionalization is a serious human rights problem.

According to the Informe especial sobre la situación de los derechos de niñas, niños y adolescentes en centros de asistencia social y albergues públicos y privados de la República mexicana [“Special Report on the situation of the rights of children and 59

adolescents in social welfare centres and public and private shelters in the Mexican Republic”], published by the National Commission on Human Rights (2019), there are currently more than 26,372 children and adolescents in residential care (p.

125). This figure is the result of the inadequate application of the standards to restrict the right to family life by Mexican authorities. This was pointed out by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (2015) when it stated that in Mexico “institutionalization continues to be the priority option over temporary care in foster families” (p. 12).

According to the provisions described above, the Mexican State is not allowed to opt for institutionalization as a preferential protection measure. On the contrary, the LGDNNA itself, the legal framework which is binding on all of the authorities in the country, characterizes residential care – institutionalization – as a subsidiary protection measure, designed to be used as a last resort and for the shortest possible time.6 Thus, the existence of tens of thousands of children and adolescents deprived of their right to family life constitutes a clear breach by the State of its obligations under the Convention and other legal systems.

One of the main reasons for the persistence and expansion of institutionalization is the failure to implement alternative means of family care. Despite the fact that the LGDNNA mandated the creation of foster care as a legal structure in Mexico almost six years ago, not all federal entities apply this public policy.7 This means that the only way to “protect” children and adolescents whose rights are seriously affected in their families of origin is through institutionalization; in other words: the absolute restriction of the human right to family life and placement in an environment that undermines the conditions necessary for the development of children.

6 Article 4, section II of the LGDNNA. 7 The legal structure of foster care is recognized by articles 4, section II, 24, and 26, paragraph II, of the LGDNNA.

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III. Legal and institutional developments Over the past decade, Mexico has made some progress on the agenda for the protection of children’s rights. The main legal changes are: • The incorporation of the principle of the best interests of the child into the text.8 This principle is the guiding principle for all authorities making decisions that directly or indirectly affect children and adolescents.

• The enactment of the General Act on the Rights of Children and Adolescents.9 The development of this legal code is the paradigm for abandoning the tutelary outlook with respect to child rights and moving forward to the outlook of comprehensive protection, in which underage persons are genuine holders of rights. In addition, as reviewed above, the LGDNNA establishes a clear standard regarding the subsidiary and exceptional appropriateness of institutionalization; and establishes different mechanisms to ensure that children and adolescents living in social assistance centres have their right to family life restored (deinstitutionalization).

• The drafting of 32 local laws on the protection of children’s rights. According to the Mexican legal system, the existence of laws of a general nature imposes on federal entities the duty to legally adjust their local provisions. Therefore, all local laws must be in conformity with the LGDNNA. • So far, ten local adoption laws have been created. Durango, Veracruz, Michoacán, Mexico state, Tamaulipas, Oaxaca, Tlaxcala, Quintana Roo, Chihuahua and Chiapas are the only 8 Constitutional amendment published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación [Official Gazette of the Federation] on 12 October 2011. The principle of the best interests of the child was incorporated into article 4, paragraph 9, of the General Constitution.

9 The LGDNNA was published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación [Official Gazette of the Federation] on 4 December 2014; it entered into force throughout the country on 5 December.

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states that have specific laws on this issue. Mexico City and the other 21 federal entities in Mexico regulate adoptions through regulations or civil codes.

• A significant amendment to the LGDNNA was published on 3 June 2019. It established, inter alia: (i) general provisions on adoptions;10 (ii) the obligation for all states in the country to create a specific legal framework on adoptions;11 (iii) a special mandate to ensure that the only way for a child or adolescent to be admitted to a social assistance centre is through Procurators Offices for Protection or a competent authority;12 (iv) a maximum period for Procurators Offices for Protection to determine the possible suitability of persons seeking adoption; and (v) a maximum period available to jurisdictional bodies to adjudicate cases of loss of parental authority and adoption proceedings in court.13 With regard to institutional developments, we should note the following: • Creation of Procurators Offices for the Protection of Children and Adolescents as specialized bodies to address all types of cases involving minors. In addition to the Federal Procurator’s Office, there are 32 more at the local level; some states even have municipal Procurators Offices.14 • The creation, for the first time in the history of Mexico, of Comprehensive Protection Systems for Children and Adolescents.15 The LGDNNA provides for the existence of these Protection Systems at national, local and municipal levels. Their main objectives are to establish legal instruments, public policies, procedures, services, and actions to protect the rights of children and adolescents.

10 Articles 30Bis 2, 30Bis 3, 30Bis 4, 30Bis 5 and 30Bis 6.

11 Transitional third article of the amendment decree, published on 3 June 2019 in the Official Gazette of the Federation.

12 Article 30Bis 1 of the LGDNNA. 13 Article 30Bis 6 of the LGDNNA. 14 Article 121 of the LGDNNA. 15 Articles 125, 136, and 138 of the LGDNNA.

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While these advances represent a significant achievement for the Mexican State, the efforts of the authorities have not been sufficient to reduce the problem of institutionalization.

It is precisely the existence of approved legal frameworks and specialized authorities in the field of childhood that must gradually make it possible to eradicate institutionalization.

Luis Peña Cruz Luis Peña Cruz is Mexican, originally from the state of Tlaxcala. He holds a master’s degree in Human Rights and Democracy from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLASCO), Mexico branch. Licentiate degree in Law from the Autonomous University of Tlaxcala. In his academic training, he has focused on human rights, constitutional law, children’s rights and criminal law.

As a civil servant, he has promoted a number of legal and institutional transformations for the benefit of children’s rights. In 2018, he coordinated the creation and implementation of the first Adoption Act for the state of Tlaxcala, which has enabled the restitution of the right to family life for dozens of children and adolescents. In 2019, he facilitated the implementation of public policy on foster care at the local level. He coordinated the first international adoptions in the state of Tlaxcala, under the international treaty on the subject, successfully completing procedures with the United States and Switzerland.

He currently serves as head of the Department for the Protection and Restitution of the Rights of Children and Adolescents in the Office of the Procurator for the Protection of Children and Adolescents of the state of Tlaxcala.

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IV. Current challenges in ensuring the right to family life and eradicating institutionalization In its Concluding Observations on the consolidated fourth and fifth regular reports submitted by Mexico, the Committee on the Rights of the Child (2015) noted, among other things, that: a) There are insufficient public policies to support families in fulfilling their parental responsibilities: This challenge remains and will not be overcome until the causes that generate the breach of the obligations inherent in parental authority are eradicated. If families lack the financial means to safeguard their children’s rights to food, health, education or culture, it is the responsibility of the State to implement public policies to make these rights effective. b) The number of children who are deprived of a family setting is unknown. This continues to be a problem in the country, owing to the lack of regulation and supervision of public and private social welfare centres in the country. c) There are no trained and specialized personnel to carry out the functions mandated by international and domestic regulations: In the case of institutionalization, the lack of awareness of the applicable standards on the part of the authorities poses a serious risk to children. Mexico should continue to work on shifting tutelary and adult-centric views away from children’s rights. All authorities must understand the serious impact that occurs when a child or adolescent is placed in a care institution.

Faced with these challenges and weaknesses identified by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Mexican State has an obligation to: (i) devise public policies from the perspective of children’s rights, to ensure that families are able to fulfil their obligations; (ii) collect ongoing information in order to know 64

exactly how many children and adolescents are institutionalized; (iii) train cadres of specialized public servants to protect the rights of children; (iv) reform legal and institutional guarantees to prevent and eradicate the phenomenon of institutionalization; (v) ensure the availability of alternative means of family care for every child or adolescent who must be separated from his or her family of origin; (vi) promote the rights of the child within the family, emphasizing the importance of good treatment and positive upbringing; (vii) promote cultural transformation in all authorities, society and families to eradicate tutelary conceptions of childhood.

These challenges can only be met by placing children and adolescents who have suffered, suffer or may suffer loss of their right to family life through institutionalization at the centre of the conversation, in an active and non-rhetorical manner.

Bibliography Committee on the Rights of the Child (2015). Concluding observations on the consolidated fourth and fifth periodic reports submitted by Mexico, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, resolution of 8 June. Retrieved from https://www.hchr.org.mx/images/doc_pub/CRC_C_MEX_CO_4-5.pdf (09/2020).

Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted on 20 November 1989 by the UN General Assembly. Retrieved from https://www.ohchr.org/en/ professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx (09/2020).

Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2012). Fornerón and daughter v.

Argentina. Merits, Reparations and Costs. Judgement of 27 April. Retrieved from https://corteidh.or.cr/docs/casos/articulos/seriec_242_esp.pdf Ley General de los Derechos de Niñas, Niños y Adolescentes [General Act on the Rights of Children and Adolescents] (LGDNNA), last amendment published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación [Official Gazette of the Federation] on 17 October 2019. Retrieved from http://www.diputados. gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/pdf/LGDNNA_171019.pdf (09/2020).

National Human Rights Commission (CNDH for its acronym in Spanish) (2019). Informe especial sobre la situación de los derechos de niñas, niños y adolescentes en centros de asistencia social y albergues públicos o privados

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de la República Mexicana. Report submitted in October. Retrieved from https://www.cndh.org.mx/sites/default/files/documentos/2019-11/IEninas- ninos-adolescentes-centros-albergues.pdf (09/2020).

Organization of American States (1969). American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR). Retrieved from https://www.cidh.oas.org/basicos/english/ basic3.american%20convention.htm (09/2020).

Political Constitution of the United Mexican States (CPEUM), last amendment published in the Diario Oficial de la Federación [Official Gazette of the Federation] on 8 May 2020. Retrieved from https://www.dof.gob.mx/ nota_detalle.php?codigo=5593045&fecha=08/05/2020 (09/2020).

Serrano, S., y Vázquez, D. (2013). Los derechos en acción. Obligaciones y principios de derechos humanos. Mexico: Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences.

United Nations (UN) (2019). Promotion and protection of the rights of children: report of the 3rd Committee: General Assembly, 74th session, 27 November 2019 by the UN General Assembly. Retrieved from https:// digitallibrary.un.org/record/3837858?ln=zh_CN (09/2020).

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T he Coercive Power of Debt: Migration and Deportation of Guatemalan Indigenous Youth

By Lauren Heidbrink

The influx of Central American unaccompanied children to the U.S. sparked debates about whether they are refugees or economic migrants. Media headlines and policymakers attributed the influx of child migrants either to an increase in cartel and gang violence or to deepening poverty in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Explanations on both sides of the forced voluntary dichotomy largely ignore the myriad historical and contextual factors that spur the contemporary migration of children. These include the enduring impact of prolonged armed conflicts, the emergence of transnational gangs, and lopsided multinational economic agreements that have deepened social inequality across the region. Amid a global enforcement regime characterized by the proliferation of private detention facilities and deportation as a routine state practice, the market for clandestine migration has grown in terms of both cost and risk.

Based on a ethnography among Indigenous unaccompanied children deported to Guatemala, I seek to illuminate an emerging type of migration—debt�driven migration—which

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blurs the oppositional distinction between forced and voluntary migration under international refugee law. Among wealth‐ constrained families in Guatemala, debt‐financed migration entails the assumption of monetary debt to finance irregular movement across international borders. While, historically, individuals or families secured loans from family and friends, increasingly, they now turn to high‐interest loans from unregulated or loosely regulated institutional actors, such as prestamistas, notaries, cooperatives, and banks, using land, homes, vehicles, or goods as collateral. Families face interest rates ranging from 2.5 to 15 percent, compounded monthly; thus, if deported, remigration may be the only viable means of debt repayment. What results is a cycle of migration and deportation, each attempt compounding the conditions that instigated migration in the first place, while at the same time enhancing the vulnerability of migrants by compelling them to travel along less secure migratory routes, using increasingly predatory smuggling networks. Many migrants presumed to voluntarily migrate for economic reasons encounter, and are compelled by, conditions similar to those that displace refugees—that is, fear of persecution, curtailment of freedoms, and even death. In other words, the dichotomy of forced/ voluntary migration overlooks the overlapping dimensions of compulsion and choice in the migration decisions of Indigenous youth and their families.

On the Move Guatemalan children are consistently the largest group of children entering the U.S. They are also disproportionately deported from the U.S. and Mexico in comparison to their Honduran and Salvadoran counterparts. According to Guatemala’s Secretaría de Bienestar Social, 95 percent of returned minors (0 to 17 years) are Indigenous—primarily Mam and K’iche’ 68

children from highland communities in the departments of Quetzaltenango, San Marcos, Quiché, Huehuetenango, and Totonicapán (Personal communication, July 2016). U.S. Customs and Border Protection data on the communities of origin of unaccompanied children apprehended from 2007 to 2017 concurs that Guatemalan migrant minors originate from primarily Indigenous communities in the highlands and along the Mexican-Guatemalan borderlands, where historically there are shared Indigenous identities with the Maya in Southern Mexico (Heidbrink 2020).

This study examines the experiences of over 100 deported young people (aged thirteen to twenty‐one in the departments of Quetzaltenango and San Marcos) and their families, tracing the ways migration and removal shape kinship relationships and remake sentiments of home and belonging. Of the youths and families participating in this research, nearly 90 percent incurred debt to fund irregular migration and, of those, 65 percent indicated that repayment of financial debt was the primary factor in the decision to remigrate. In a context of historical and structural violence, the coercive power of debt over Indigenous communities should not be discounted in immigration law.

Since Indigenous families rather than individuals typically assume migratory debt, the effects of this debt seep into intimate familial relationships, with a lasting impact on young people’s well‐being and sense of belonging. In the context of growing deportations, this engenders poor outcomes for young migrants and their families because it ensnares them in a cycle of debt‐driven migration and deportation, a phenomenon distinct from voluntary economic migration.

Rodrigo: “Soy un fracaso” Deported from Mexico to Guatemala after two failed attempts to migrate to the U.S., sixteen‐year‐old Rodrigo was grappling 69

with the decision to try again. “I am ashamed they caught me.

We mortgaged our land. My family depends on me to work hard and to support our family, but now this. Soy un fracaso. I don’t know what to do.” The land he references was mortgaged to a local notario and had been his inheritance; it was land where he might have built a home and started a family. The conditions that prompted his migration were now compounded by the added financial debt, the stigma associated with deportation, and the foreclosure of his future livelihood.

Surrounded by rumors of delinquency, failure, and, for girls, allegations of promiscuity or prostitution, young people who have been deported are often assumed to have committed a legal transgression or to have succumbed to moral weakness, thereby warranting their detention. Often ostracized by the community, and at times by their own families, young people experience tremendous anxiety and stigma on their return. In spite of rising numbers of deportees to Central America, there is little distinction between those who are detained because of their unlawful presence and those who are charged with committing a delinquent or criminal act in Mexico and the U.S. Rodrigo describes feeling tremendous shame and guilt at his failure to arrive, and remain, in the U.S., which is a sentiment shared by several other youths who reported hiding in their homes for three to four weeks upon their return, embarrassed and ashamed by what they viewed as a personal and sometimes spiritual failure. It is important to note that Rodrigo never envisioned his migration as a rejection of “home”; rather, it signified an investment in his family’s well‐being and his own future. His deportation, compounded by the pressures of debt, powerfully complicated this sense of place. It also imperiled his future.

In San Marcos, with the notary threatening his family with eviction, and near certain hunger to follow, Rodrigo concluded

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that remigration was the only viable alternative. With each passing month, their debt grew exponentially. With 62 percent of the working population underemployed (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas 2016), Rodrigo faced overwhelming odds against securing employment with his fourth‐grade education. Coerced by financial debt and structural poverty, he reflected: “I go, or we all suffer and die, maybe not tomorrow but the next month or next year. This is not a choice.”

Framed as an economic migrant, Rodrigo has few avenues by which to avoid immediate deportation or to remain lawfully in the U.S., yet he confronts the threat of starvation and pronounced structural poverty if he remains. While neither reason is sufficient for a successful claim under international refugee law, akin to refugees, the consequences for Rodrigo and his family include the curtailment of freedom and limited state protection from the notary’s threats. Absent state regulations to adequately regulate financial transactions or judicial processes to bring predatory lenders to justice, Rodrigo and his family face eviction and entering into an even more calamitous economic situation. Thus, it is virtually impossible to divorce economics from human rights motivations for his migration—a lived reality that complicates the mutually exclusive categories of voluntary and forced migration that bureaucracies routinely seek (Castles 2003).

Debt‐Financed Migration Under the current global enforcement regime, irregular migration from Guatemala with any measure of certainty or safety necessitates access to substantial social and financial capital. Accordingly, debt‐financed migration involves a diverse cross‐section of actors and institutions. Families may mortgage their land, pool funds from friends and family, borrow heavily

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from local prestamistas, notaries, attorneys, or increasingly banks, cooperatives, or churches. Families recount that, in the past, they borrowed funds primarily from family and friends, or via remittances, to pay for smuggling costs; now they frequently turn to institutions and other community actors. Legacies of discriminatory land reform among Indigenous communities in the highlands of Guatemala shape the capital resources available to families for daily survival (Moran‐Taylor and Taylor 2010). As a result, families commonly utilize land as collateral to fund irregular migration. For those who do not own land, unauthorized migration is often an impossibility.

Nongovernmental organizations and cooperatives are also involved in the financing of irregular migration from Guatemala.

Directors of several cooperatives I interviewed described awarding loans for infusion into local businesses or agricultural production while candidly admitting their knowledge that these loans actually fund migration. As one cooperative director observed, “Nobody comes to say, ‘I need to send my son to the U.S., and I need money quickly.’ But we know the realities of our community and we know that people need access to money to migrate. We don’t ask, and nobody asks us.” Only recently has the Coordinadora de Organizaciones No Gubernamentales y Cooperativas begun to clamp down on these transactions through audits, site visits, and repealing the business licenses.

Financial institutions are not to be outdone. Banks market insurance packages to would‐be migrants and their families, undertaking to repatriate the bodies of migrants if they should die en route to or in the U.S., covering costs that reach ten thousand dollars, U.S. To rival the profits from the wire transfer services of Moneygram and Western Union, banks have created “migrant accounts” that allow U.S.‐based migrants to deposit funds for immediate access by family members residing in Guatemala—for a sizable fee. Bank loans previously taken

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out to fund irregular migration are now expressly prohibited

by Banco Industrial, Banco G&T Continental, and Banrural, Guatemala’s largest banks. A Banrural executive explained the policy change in lending: “With increased enforcement of the border compounded by the decreasing demand for low‐ wage labor in the U.S., migrants defaulting on their debts grew commonplace. This led banks to further restrict our lending and enhance our requirements for lenders.” However, interviews with local bank managers and deported migrants reveal that the practice continues unabated.

Families utilize debt in a number of ways, not exclusively to fund migration. Families may take a line of credit to invest in a family business; to fund agricultural products such as seeds, compost, and fertilizer at the start of a harvest; to purchase a household appliance or an automobile; to pay for medical services, such as hospital stays, laboratory tests, or medication; or to pay for funeral expenses. Taken together, the proliferation of actors engaged in issuing credit, poorly regulated banking and lending practices, and usurious interest rates have served to expand the use of credit and debt as a means of navigating intergenerational, structural poverty. Thus, a failed harvest or business endeavor, illness, or death may have devastating consequences. In these ways, debt may also drive irregular migration.

The material changes wrought by the cycle of debt‐financed migration and subsequent deportation have a profound impact on young people’s lives. Youth experience restricted access to food, shelter, or health care; limited education or employment opportunities; imperiled safety and well‐being; and risks to their sense of belonging within families and communities.

The consequences of the cycle of debt‐funded migration and deportation powerfully constrain young people’s lives, at times with disastrous consequences to themselves and to their families.

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Conclusion The debate about whether unaccompanied children are refugees or economic migrants is consequential. The 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol narrowly define refugees as those forced to leave their countries as a result of individual persecution because of specific grounds such as race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a social group. States maintain the latitude to expand this definition to consider other forms of forced migration, such as natural or environmental disasters, chemical or nuclear disasters, famine, or development projects. However, most nations maintain a narrow definition of forced migration. Importantly, the 1951 Refugee Convention declares the right to nonrefoulement. This means that immigration authorities cannot return individuals to places where they fear persecution or where their freedoms would be curtailed. In theory, Central Americans who express a well�founded fear of persecution cannot be deported from the U.S. without an audience before an immigration judge.

In contrast, economic migrants are presumed to voluntarily migrate as a result of their own wishes or motivations: as economic migrants, they are deported with no due process, judicial audience, or access to an attorney. As such, no specialized protections exist for economic migrants.

Ethnographic research with Indigenous Guatemalans reveals that the causes of child migration are both historical and emergently complex (Heidbrink 2018). Nevertheless, in a dynamic landscape of the actors and institutions now involved in irregular migration, states continue to turn to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol to provide protections for migrants. New social realities such as debt�driven migration, however, do not readily correspond to laws that never imagined their existence. Thus, international refugee law fails to acknowledge that young people are transnational social actors, or that they may confront

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child‐specific harms such as Lauren Heidbrink forced gang conscription Lauren Heidbrink is an anthropologist and or recruitment as Associate Professor in Human Development at child soldiers, for California State University, Long Beach, USA. She example. Yet, youth is author of Migrant Youth, Transnational Families are engaged in and the State: Care and Contested Interests (U. of complex, multilayered Pennsylvania Press 2014) and Migranthood: Youth negotiations around in a New Era of Deportation (Stanford U. Press 2020). She is founder and co-editor of www. collective and individual YouthCirculations.com. survival and betterment in a context of growing global inequity. They manage and employ transnational migration as a collective and historically rooted survival strategy, which responds to past experiences of violence and the marginalization of Indigenous communities in Guatemala, and to their present and future needs. Thus, examining debt‐driven migration of Indigenous youth productively problematizes established migratory typologies under international refugee law and simultaneously compels consideration of the enduring consequences of deportation on young people and their families.

Bibliography Castles, S. (2003). Towards a Sociology of Forced Migration and Social Transformation. Sociology 37(1): 13– 34.

Heidbrink, L. (2018). Circulation of care among unaccompanied migrant youth from Guatemala. Children and Youth Services Review, 92, 30-38.

Heidbrink, L. (2020). Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation.

Stanford University Press.

Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (2016). Encuesta Nacional de Empleo e Ingresos. http://www.ine.gob.gt/index.php/encuestas/empleo-e-ingresos.

Moran‐Taylor, M. and Taylor, M. (2010). Land and Leña: Linking Transnational Migration, Natural Resources, and the Environment in Guatemala.

Population and Environment 32(2/3): 198– 215.

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Humanizing from the immediacy of bodies. Children and education; territories for social transformation

By MarĂ­a Alejandra Castiglioni

In these times, many of us reiterate – emphatically – the need to humanize. I wonder why that is. This is a huge question that leads to a situational, sensitive and interdisciplinary analysis; as for the latter, I shall bring together for discussion and joint reflection, Early Childhood Education, the Sociology of Culture and the Anthropology of the Body.

Initially, why the questions? I ask and I shall continue to ask because I understand that thought is movement and questions allow us to travel through it creating the possibility of encountering and reuniting with ourselves and with others, thus rethinking ourselves in order to read our worlds Also, I believe that we humanize by inhabiting the integrity of our being, legitimizing our corporeal experience, and critical intercultural education is a powerful and possible path for social transformation.

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Boaventura de Sousa Santos mentions the need to demonumentalize hegemonic knowledge. I consider that this is closely related to humanization (2009). Centuries of modernity in which a deliberate dissociation between reason and emotion, body and soul, and other divisions have fragmented human integrity, leading to dehumanization. Thus, the white, western, patriarchal and colonial perspective has organized doing, thinking, dreaming, the production of knowledge and power structures; that is, being. But today, as in other passages in our history, on the threshold of the unknown and immersed in the unrest of discomfort – arising when a pandemic starkly reveals profound inequities – utopia moves away and we once again rise up in order to build hope for a new order. To paraphrase Zemelman, I believe that the need is erupting today to build a different future, inhabiting the present and inspired by that utopia that calls us to move forward while distancing itself; that is, invites us to take action that does not conclude and is based on the potential of today to dream, to discover a future (2001).

“Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. [...] So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.”

Eduardo Galeano This walking speaks to us of a committed journey towards the genuine realization of rights for all children, without exclusion; the right to play, to identity, to culture, to education, which – for its part – pulls in all the rest. The Convention on the Rights of the Child leaves us in no doubt that this is indisputable, but we know that reality shows us a debt that we must pay. This refers to an unavoidable rights-based perspective, understanding each child as a holder of rights from birth, a citizen of today, an intercultural citizen.

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Rethinking that gap, questioning it in the face of the evidence that this pandemic lays bare, gives us the opportunity to challenge hegemonic dehumanization and I believe that education and childhood are privileged territories in which to try this out, inhabiting – moreover – the power of Latin American rebellion, of American being.

Why childhood?

According to Kohan, the Argentine philosopher, humanity bears childhood features that do not abandon it and that it cannot abandon (fortunately!). This entails the possibility of expanding our sensitivity to the experience of childhood and its vital impulse, caring for it lovingly (2004:274). I adhere to thinking about childhood as a social, historical and emancipatory political category, and even more, to holding that “individualized children are holders of rights, but childhood as a social category is the subject of social change” (Bustelo, 2011:154).

There is also much to mention in relation to education, but, briefly, we should cite it as a right, a political, cultural and social institution, a territory of unfinished disputes and processes of cultural resignification and the construction of subjectivities and the identities of social subjects. An education that needs to be situated; that is, it is only relevant when it houses collective knowledge and thoughts, legacies between generations, the focus of our pedagogical intent to make sense of the educational conversation. Positioning this proposal undoubtedly poses a major challenge, especially at this global juncture.

How to do it in a reality that is so unstable and very different from the school-based landscapes with which we are familiar.

How to build a comprehensive process, recognizing the new interactions that operate in the experience of teaching and learning, those of the home. Even considering the diversity of households that exist, those that shelter and those that 78

do not manage to shelter children. Currently, the educational conversation includes different resources – in homes – carrying content very similar to those set out in our curricular designs, but located differently; in that resides their wealth. As educators and learners, as Freire mentions, we currently learn in order to listen more and recover what children, together with their families, have been building in recent months. The truth is that the everyday life of the home is today, the School of Life – as Tonucci says in his conversations – and this is the reference we can use to think of a different school, now and when returning to face-to-face classrooms.

McLaren (1990) tells us about the alienating nature of what is real and in this instance of problematization, and on the basis of ethnography, I like to talk about observant participation.

This implies being part of a critical analysis capitalizing on experience, the sensitive record of what we experience as educators. This makes it easier to build collective feeling, an event that transcends what is singular to forge what is shared, a feeling that frames and brings us together by the warmth of an educational proposal.

For its part, the educational community as a socializing, transforming, creative, permeable, complex and dynamic body demonstrates the coexistence of a multiplicity of childhoods that create and reproduce meanings relative to their family, cultural and social contexts, among tensions and exchanges.

Clearly, this implies understanding education as a sphere of disputes and every child in his/her/their exceptional nature, beings of transformation and not of adaptation (Freire, 2005).

This is why the educational act is an ethical and political act.

How to embody the perspective of social transformation? Here I include the perspective of critical intercultural education in the discussion. Let us look very briefly at how this pedagogical, methodological, political, educational perspective evolves in the region in order to better understand it...

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For Luis Enrique López (2000), around the 1970s the concept of interculturality emerged in the social sciences, closely linked to the Latin American indigenous problem, in the struggle for rights and territory. In addition to the heterogeneity that the enormous ethnic diversity of the region possesses, there were numerous migratory movements in the 1990s, and cultural analysis focused on this in the relational field. Then the topic moved to the field of education, the concept permeated schools and thus the concept of intercultural education emerged, understanding heterogeneity as heritage. In this way, it was positioned on the regional public agenda and in the debate on educational and constitutional reforms in the international sphere. Interculturalism has thus become a current theme due to the struggles of social, political and ancestral movements and their demands for the recognition of their rights, which are so very present in our realities. It is unavoidable to quote Catherine Walsh, who says: “... interculturality has meant a struggle in which issues such as cultural identification, rights and differences, autonomy and nation have been in constant dispute. It is no wonder that one of the focal points of this struggle is education as a political, social and cultural institution...” (2010:79).

The intercultural perspective proposes an education rooted in the culture of the students, preparing the territory for the emergence of other cultures. Hence, the importance of referencing the contexts that children bring with them, as their heritage – neither homogeneous nor hegemonic – to be referenced, accommodating diversity in a significant and inspiring space, while heterogeneity synchronizes the whole, transversally. This approach arises from a respectful, decolonizing and thus critical outlook; that is, a journey towards transformation based on doing, which is decolonizing knowledge, being, thinking, dreaming; that is, being.

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The importance of legitimizing the most genuine of gestures and – among them – the voice of children, invites us to remain attentive to adult-centric discourses that format them; sooner or later they erupt in the form of disciplines and within them, the colonial wound emerges. This instance calls us to critically deny the denial that has survived for more than 400 years, taking the forms of exoticization, invisibilization and subordination. This conviction entails the historical urgency of recovering what has been denied and it is possible to do so from the earliest age, capturing that questioning that is so typical of children.

For our part, our history of cultural and pedagogical colonization is inscribed in our bodies. Why think of the educational fact on the basis of bodies? Because they allow us to inhabit our being, and in particular, the educational conversation, from the beginning of our existence. This implies approaching an analysis of the educational act from an ethical and aesthetic perspective.

I share the idea that everything happens in our bodies, they sustain human life through time and also, according to Nietzsche, they surprise. We are unaware of the immeasurable capacity of our bodies to perceive and express, but perhaps the image of a giant in Greek mythology can help us to visualize it: Argus Panoptes saw everything; he had one hundred eyes scattered throughout his body and was considered to be a very effective guardian, according to the myth. We carry an infinite number of eyes with which to look at the external and internal world, constantly perceiving the evidence, which makes us think that our relational existence is bodily. This is where the Anthropology of the Body enters the conversation.

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Argus Panoptes

So, what are we talking about when we talk about bodies?

Our body, as a cultural, social and political construct located in a time and a space, is the territory where our life is inscribed; as well as that of past generations, and also our deaths; even imprinting the traces of historical journeys and the realization or denial of our rights. The body as a thread of life that houses a complex assembly of unique anthropological, cultural, psychic and physical dispositions that make sense in each socially situated interaction (Karsenti, 2011). The body still acts in apparent passivity, in the silence, in the distance, in the gaze 82

that hides from or penetrates us, in tension and in calm; it houses and evidences the experience of the relationships that we establish, processes, gestures, modes of perception, as well as our rituals, bodily techniques, dances and aesthetics typical of each culture.

At the same time, the body conforms to another body, hence the importance of an adult who humanizes when sustaining or not, with a word, with a look, with an embrace, with a tone of voice, with listening, with a pause, with availability, as well as with the dedication of the space and time we have to accommodate a child. According to Daniel Calmels, the body is not given to us, it is formed together with another (2009). Because of this, we can say that the acting body is shaped together with other affecting bodies that exert a corporizing function, to sculpt significant bodies while our identity is shaped, while our subjectivity is constituted.

Meanwhile, bodies show evidence of a culture and this manifests itself in the modulation of our voices, the texture and colour of our hair, the colour of our skin, our posture, the way we dress, walk, use our hands, show and hide ourselves, talk, pass the time, among other gestures. Precisely as – according to Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch – the concept of culture comprises a whole, even individuals do not end up in their own skin, since it is extended in their customs, in their institutions (2008). Bartomeu Melià refers to the skin that covers us describing it as a tight and pleasant glove in which we are contained, which expresses us and through which we tell of ourselves ( ). Thus, bodies carry culture, they account for diversity and the most varied expressions of it; that is, ethnicity, nationality, religion, age, sex, self-perceived gender, class, nationality, etc. We are the emanations of our landscapes, says Rita Segato (2018); with which I agree and even more, I believe we are our contexts, the echoes of our culture.

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What do we mean by culture?

From the Sociology of Culture and cultural analysis, a territory of strategies to inhabit the world and give meaning to our relationship with each of the worlds we inhabit. This settles in the memory of doing, which is first and foremost a dwelling.

As this evolves in the density of bonds, the imprint of that conversation with ourselves, with others, with the community, with nature and with the sacred is recorded and in that totality the meaning and continuity of our existence is resignified (Olmos, 2003).

I must focus on the urgency that this time of pandemic demonstrates and communicates regarding the need to review our relationship with Mother Nature. Moreover, everything is accentuated in this historical moment where the virulence of a virus does not recognize self-perceived privileges, makes us equal in the face of its hostility, does not distinguish ethnicity, age, nationality, social class; there is no self-perceived prestige that protects from its virulence. I believe that once again, nature commands and locates us in a historical moment for political advocacy that allows us to review the matrix that organizes our perception of the other and of other cultures and to do so, recover the voice of children. Thinking about culture in a relational key shows us the need to review our dialogues with ourselves and with others, and to reorder ourselves; this is also culture.

Returning to social or educational contexts, in the preventive and compulsory distancing that many of our countries have experienced or are experiencing, I think there is a need to find other ways to connect us, transcending the materiality of our bodies. That is, to think of the power of gestures, for example, to inhabit other ways of embracing one another. So, thinking about them is connecting with the density of the bodies

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involved, reviewing the spaces through which they advance, discovering the senses with which each culture imbues them, observing the availability of one body towards another body, analysing the representations that erupt in that interaction, and it is also thinking about the political contexts that deny decent conditions of life to childhood by taking away not only food and shelter, but also embraces.

“The system feeds neither the body nor the heart: many are condemned to starve for lack of bread and many more for lack of embraces” (Galeano, :58).

In view of this, is it possible to think that there is something beyond the materiality of our bodies? There is no doubt that nothing replaces a physical presence, but what happens in the thickness of the borders they outline? There is an interface between the boundaries of bodies, where these gestures, voices and stories circulate, this is the area of corporeality. It is a powerful territory where the experience that is inscribed in our bodies is amassed, a territory where exchanges erupt; that is, where the transformative and therefore critical experience inhabits. It is that place where we can rediscover the power of gestures, to embrace and sustain ourselves in other ways, to humanize our bonds and build a web of hope that is not naivety but critical and committed expectation.

This is also the territory where representations of otherness circulate. We carry our diversity generating the most varied representations, derived from personal histories or impregnated with other historical and social contexts, arbitrary representations that are not based on the very nature of human beings or their organic and psychic constitution. All of them converse and generate tension, conflict and consensus in this “inter” sphere of corporeality. For Le Breton (2002), diversity mutates towards stigma, which is why I believe that invisibilities, denials, exoticization thus arise that have settled 85

in our bodies by disciplining the experience of another and of ourselves, resulting from hegemonic outlooks that turn others into waste, mark and discard children, expel human beings into a neoliberal abyss. Humanizing may require the real possibility of questioning representations produced by other people’s imaginaries, which continue to shape the childhood experience and the perception of those who share a path in this life.

The foregoing considerations refer to the sphere of corporeality, which allows us to think about the need to put the accent on bodies, and even more so, on the bodies of children. Why? Because of the significant immediacy of infantile bodies that is presented in an exceptional state of being, visible in their genuine gestures, and among them, the voice of children. We observe every day, the urgency of children’s bodies, that which is so characteristic of them and that, as children’s educators is characteristic of us as well. Freire considered that “we learn, teach and know with the whole body through emotions, desires, fears, passion and critical reason, never with that alone” (2005,27). Therefore, and on our experience as educators is based the need to accommodate respectfully the gestures of children as evidence of their desires, their emotions, their fears, their knowledge, and propitiate appropriations so that they can also express and value them, which implies the daily possibility of legitimizing their bodies.

Returning to the need to humanize... When the body was considered as a container, as the boundary of individuality, as an enclosure of the individual and therefore an object, it is then that a body dissociated from man appears, disintegrated from his humanity (Le Breton, 2002). Thus, we see a disciplined body, restricted by certain correctnesses that sometimes even invade the field of early childhood education, correcting movements, shaping times, ordering silences and imposing the concept of “being still”, stereotyping games, body techniques or dances,

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disciplining emotions according to gender, class or the most diverse categories in which the world is organized.

There is no humanity without emotion, according to Maturana (1992). It is worth referring again to emotion, because it is part of our being, of our humanity, it is the emanation of our interior, although not exempt from cultural structures. The body expresses and perceives emotion and it needs to be inhabited.

Thinking of today, we could say that we are now facing a new laboratory of unexplored emotions that it is worth positing, for example, vulnerability, the threatening nature of the pandemic, the uncertainty of today and tomorrow, all emotions that are part of our new being and the children, who are experiencing

Mg. María Alejandra Castiglioni Professor of Preschool Education (1983), graduated from Escuela Normal Nacional No. 1, Pte. Roque Sáenz Peña. She worked as a teacher for twenty years. She holds a degree in Public Relations (1988) from the Argentine University of Business. Specialist in Cultural Management and Cultural Policies (2009) and master’s degree in Sociology of Culture and Cultural Analysis (2018) from the Higher Institute of Social Studies of the National University of San Martín. Research line: Critical intercultural education in early childhood from a corporeal perspective. An interdisciplinary outlook between Early Childhood Education, Sociology of Culture and Anthropology of the Body. She has produced articles, publications, presentations and workshops at national and regional levels.

She is a dancer. Modern dance and dance therapy .

Currently: Administrative Vice President of OMEP Argentina and Coordinator of the OMEP Programme, CERCA TUYO [Near You].

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it together with us. Emotions unfold in an area that mediates between bodies, there they unfold, create tensions and transform, and transform us.

In this context of speeded up times, of the circulation of virtual messages, of incessant emotions, something remains despite the urgencies... the presence of a child who more than ever needs us to pause in order to feel that it is he/she/they that I choose to look at, for whom I choose to fight, my embrace goes out to him/her/them, today an embrace in which the arms extend exceedingly, precisely in that territory that is corporeality.

Perhaps it is time to feel/think our bodies more, that this should be a step to review how we inhabit them and how we own them, recognizing them as the territory and slate of emancipatory practices to build a more humane outlook at the common House we inhabit, a new joint responsibility to exist, building societies of peace, defending the ethical principle of life.

To conclude... I think that within the adversity of this pandemic, there is an opportunity to expand the experience of childhood, accommodating its vital impulse to reinvent fairer, more humane landscapes, where a new order emerges from this chaos that may find us lovingly available to the presence of each child, pausing next to their uniqueness, bringing rifts with their gestures – of course – but always inviting us to a new beginning (Bustelo, 2011).

And during this night, to schedule a more humane dawn, there must be tenderness in our ways of bonding, imagining and inhabiting the world. Alejandro Cussianovich states that tenderness must be understood as a political virtue, as an inescapable component of our educational, family, professional practice, whatever finds us working for a more just and

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meaningful world (2009). Undoubtedly... solidarity is the face of the tenderness of peoples.

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Buenos Aires, Siglo XXI Editores.

Calmels, D. (2009). Infancias del cuerpo. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Puerto Creativo.

Cussianovich, A. (2009). Ensayos sobre infancia II. Sujetos de derechos y protagonista. Peru, Iflejant.

Freire, P. (2005). Cartas a quien pretende enseñar [Letters to Those Who Dare Teach]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo XXI Editores.

Galeano, E. (2012). El libro de los abrazos [The Book of Embraces]. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo XXI Editores.

Karsenti, B. (2011). “Técnicas del cuerpo y normas sociales”. Revista Impetus, vol. 78, 79-84. Retrieved from http://web.unillanos.edu.co/docus/ RevistaimpetusVol.78(capitulo%2011).pdf (8/9/2016) Kohan, W. (2004). Infancia entre educación y filosofía. Barcelona, Spain: Laertes Kusch, R. (2008). La negación en el pensamiento popular. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Las cuarenta.

Le Breton, D. (2002). Antropología del cuerpo y modernidad. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Nueva Visión.

Le Breton, D. (2008). La sociología del cuerpo. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Nueva Visión.

López, L. E. (2000). La cuestión de la interculturalidad y la educación latinoamericana - Programa de Formación en Educación Intercultural Bilingüe en los Países Andinos (PROEIB Andes). Working Document San Simón, Universidad Mayor de San Simón.

Maturana, H. (1992). Emociones y Lenguaje en Educación y Política. 5th edition. Santiago de Chile, Chile: Centro de Educación del Desarrollo (CEO).

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Olmos, H., y Santillán, R. (2003). Educar en Cultura. Ensayos para una Acción Integrada. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Ciccus.

Segato, R. (2018). Contra-pedagogías de la crueldad. Buenos Aires, Argentina: PROMETEO. Sousa, B. de (2009). Una epistemología del Sur. La reinvención del conocimiento y la emancipación social. Mexico: CLACSO and Siglo XXI. Walsh, C. (2010). Interculturalidad crítica y educación intercultural en Construyendo Interculturalidad Crítica. La Paz, Bolivia: Instituto Internacional de Integración Convenio Andrés Bello.

Zemelman, H. (2001). Pensar teórico y pensar epistémico: Los retos de las ciencias sociales latinoamericanas. In Instituto Pensamiento y Cultura en América A. C., Enseñar a pensar. Mexico: IPECAL.

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T he situation of institutionalized children and adolescents.

An account of a reality which is denied in Mexico

By Oscar Melchor Moreno

On 4 December 2014, the Mexican Congress decreed the entry into force of the General Act on the Rights of Children and Adolescents. One of its main objectives was the recognition of children as rights-holders.1 This implied a major challenge for institutions, organizations and society itself, since it involved dislodging the welfare-based, tutelary and adult-centric vision that prevailed in childcare in Mexico.

An undeniable aspect of this law is that it constitutes a response to the historical debt that exists with regard to the care and protection of children and that, for the purposes of this article, it focuses on the situation/condition of children who are deprived of parental care.

This law was clearly intended to contribute to developing a new protection paradigm with enforcement, monitoring and follow1 Ley General de los Derechos de Niñas, Niños y Adolescentes [‘General Act on the Rights of Children and Adolescents’].

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up mechanisms focusing on the comprehensive restitution of children’s rights, which is a great challenge since it implies applying innovative practices over a pre-existing, ‘old’ and certainly insufficient structure.2 After six years of implementation, violations of rights in institutional areas still exist, with particularly serious situations such as those involving the Gran Familia [Great Family] and Casitas del Sur [Little Southern Houses],3 and many others that were less visible but equally sensitive.

In 2019, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH for its acronym in Spanish) noted in its Special Report on the situation of children and adolescents in social welfare centres,4 a total of seven recommendations and seven complaints addressed to different states, relating to serious violations of children’s rights. In addition, this report gave an account of the situations that triggered the agency’s intervention, making it easy to imagine the impact of the events and their effects on the lives of children and adolescents.

This is without prejudice to the different situations that use other means to shed light on the condition of girls and boys deprived of parental care and who are housed in a centre.

In the course of only two weeks, situations were reported on digital being subjected to beatings by a control him was recorded, in Baja

three particularly serious media; in Jalisco,5 a child ‘caregiver’ attempting to California,6 a ‘meditation

2 In the report on costs and proposals for strengthening the Office of the Procurator for the Protection of Children and Adolescents prepared by UNICEF Mexico, it is estimated that the Office operates, on average, with 27% of the budget that it would actually need to fulfil its duties as described in the Act. 3 A special report on the situation of child rights in social welfare centres and public and private shelters in the Republic of Mexico. (2019) Mexico, CNDH. 4 Special report on the situation of child rights in social welfare centres and public and private shelters in the Republic of Mexico. (2019) Mexico, CNDH. 5 Juan Carlos G. Partida. (2020). A video broadcast on child abuse in a shelter in Jalisco.

26 September 2020, from La Jornada website: https://www.jornada.com.mx/ultimas/ estados/2020/08/13/difunden-video-sobre-abusos-a-menores-en-albergue-en-jalisco-5860.html 6 Gabriela Martínez (2020). Albergue DIF en Tijuana, una casa del horror. 26 September 2020,

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room’ was discovered, in which children were left for days and even weeks when they had committed some ‘infraction’, clearly in the style of an isolation cell in a prison, all claiming to be ‘therapeutic’; and finally, in Morelos,7 a group of adolescents ‘mutinied’ for different reasons, the situation was so critical that the intervention of the police was requested in order to ‘contain’ the children. Today the focus is on ‘quantifying’ the ‘damage’ caused by the teenagers.

This account does not intend to ‘capitalize’ on suffering, nor to further infringe upon the situation that is already particularly painful for the children involved, much less to focus only on criticism and disparagement. This review aims to highlight a problem that is perhaps even more serious than the events described: the denial of this reality.

To explain the reason for this denial, it is worth considering the following points: A) To what extent have society and the State naturalized the placement of children in centres that it is seen as ‘normal’.

In situations such as those described, public opinion focuses on changing the forms, but without stopping to think about the background, what are the situations that really lead to children living, growing and reaching adulthood in these institutions, why are children institutionalized or why are they still institutionalized. If we do not stop to reflect on this, these situations will not cease and are very likely to worsen, at least that is the experience that the region has shown us.

B) How can we read about these painful situations and then just turn over the page? Situations such as those described are documented and even videotaped; findings or ‘evidence’ from La Jornada website: https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/estados/albergue-dif-en-tijuana-unacasa-del-horror 7 Rubicela Morelos Cruz (2020). Se amotinan jóvenes del DIF en Temixco; controlan revuelta. 26 September 2020, from La Jornada website: https://www.jornada.com.mx/ultimas/ estados/2020/09/02/se-amotinan-jovenes-del-dif-en-temixco-controlan-revuelta-9303.html

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are not lacking, what do we need to see or experience before raising our voices and putting the main focus on the need for care and protection for girls and boys in their everyday lives?

The centres become especially significant around holidays such as Twelfth Night, children’s day and Christmas, but the rest of the year, it would seem, they are lost in time.

C) Why do we accept the fact that the measure taken in situations involving rights violations or the abuse of children or adolescents is their ‘removal’ from their territory, community, environment and, therefore, a family? Let us imagine for a moment how to explain to a child that in addition to the situation of violence he or she has experienced, he or she now has to experience, live together with others and endure talking about the most painful thing in his or her life in front of a group of strangers. Perhaps the most serious thing will be when children ‘forget’ why they are there and only suppose that they are there because that is where they belong.

D) In Mexico it is estimated that there are 33,1188 children in residential care. This is an estimate, because there is no clear and certain mechanism that gives us a clearer picture of the situation, and hence the reflection, Why is it so difficult for us to grasp that we are talking about some 33,000 lives, that are trying to stay afloat, trying to find meaning in life, filling gaps, inventing moments and above all, looking for answers?

E) The challenge is to create an understanding that referring to children as rights-holders means that they must appropriate and recognize in themselves the right to be well treated, cared for and protected by the State, society, teams, families, organizations, academia, etc. When a child 8 Special report on the situation of child rights in social welfare centres and public and private shelters in the Republic of Mexico. (2019) Mexico, CNDH. Pp. 125.

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or adolescent appropriates and exercises that right, we will have taken a big step forward.

These reflections may not be easy to address, respond to and perhaps to attend to; as the reflection becomes more complex it will seem to reach a deadlock, more of the same or titanic tasks that make us feel that we are losing our grip on meaning.

It is because of this chain of complexity that I venture to say that the first response that may arise is: the denial of reality. It is ‘easier’ to pretend that nothing is happening and/or to think that any problems are resolved by improving buildings or with isolated and decontextualized actions rather than by going into the web of arguments and recognizing that the answer is a systemic, collaborative response that requires the participation of all social actors and the State; however, sooner or later we will have to emerge and provide an answer.

First, to those 33,000 children and adolescents, when they ask why their childhood was so different to and so much more asymmetrical than others; to explain to them that perhaps our protective response fell short of their needs and that this is not their responsibility; to tell them that they can/have to cut the cycle, in order to think about themselves and live their lives to the full.

At the same time, to explain to other children why there are children who do not live with a family and who, owing to situations beyond their control, had to learn to live within an institutional set-up. Explain to them with reasons that move beyond criminalizing the families of origin. Explain on the basis of a systemic perspective of the problem and therefore of the complexity of the task.

The next step will be how to explain to ourselves that this is today the situation that afflicts the children of our region; more

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than 240,000 children in Latin America are going through very similar processes in their structures and, most particularly because of their context. Regardless of our status as an institution, organization, academy, etc., sooner or later we shall have to face this reality.

Today we have one more experience that can enable this response, the health crisis will lead to repercussions in many social fields, and children are not exempt, as regards both those children who are at risk of loss of care, and the increase or deepening of the problem of institutionalized children.

As a society we are experiencing conditions of life under social distancing and isolation. Because of the health emergency, we are experiencing the closure of social containment areas and have moved education, relationships, attachments and emotional ties into a single physical space, redefining the boundaries of privacy and singularity. This is very far from the living conditions of institutionalized children and adolescents, they are similar, but not the same.

However, what we have been experiencing can generate a certain level of understanding and empathy and represent a reality check that sheds light on the everyday lives of children and that demands answers.

Faced with this scenario, there are experiences and knowledge that serve as outlooks and that should not be lost sight of9 in this search: a) It is necessary to take work with families seriously and forcefully and, in fact, to work towards the rehabilitation of their care capacities. Move away from criminalizing visions of the family of origin and design comprehensive empowerment strategies.

9 RELAF and UNICEF, (2011). Guide to standards for the personnel of public and private entities dealing with the protection of the rights of children and adolescents. Applying the United Nations Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children, Buenos Aires, Argentina: RELAF and UNICEF. Available at: https://www.relaf.org/biblioteca/Directrices_VA.pdf

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Oscar Melchor Moreno Oscar Melchor Moreno is a psychologist graduated from the Metropolitan Autonomous University, Xochimilco Unit, and holds diplomas in prevention and care of genderbased violence, trafficking in persons, human rights and public policies. He has worked at the Office of the Procurator for the Protection of the Rights of Children and Adolescents in Mexico City, where he participated in drawing up protocols for the detection and care of child abuse in families and the protocol for re-educational care for men who perpetrate violence against women and girls. He has been teaching at the Faculty of Higher Studies ‘Acatlán’ of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in the bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and Political Sciences and Public Administration for 4 years. He currently serves as Coordinator in Mexico of the Network of Latin-American Fostering Families (RELAF for its acronym in Spanish).

b) Continue the implementation of foster care when children and adolescents have to be separated from their families. Support and strengthen the measure with resources to generate the sustainability of foster care programmes, so that they can become a real, accessible and safe alternative when a child needs it. Enable networks available to children by providing in-depth support to ensure care.

It is imperative never to forget to raise questions and keep alive our capacity for questioning and analysis; it is imperative to stop denying reality and to commit to new forms of childcentred care; to maximize their best interests and, above all, to generate the protection plans that every child and adolescent in the region deserves.

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Bibliography CNDH. (2019). A special report on the situation of child rights in social welfare centres and public and private shelters in the Republic of Mexico.

Mexico: CNDH. G. Partida, J. C. (2020). A video broadcast on child abuse in a shelter in Jalisco. 26 September 2020. La Jornada. https://www.jornada.com.mx/ ultimas/estados/2020/08/13/difunden-video-sobre-abusos-a-menoresen-albergue-en-jalisco-5860.html Ley General de los Derechos de Niñas, Niños y Adolescentes [‘General Act on the Rights of Children and Adolescents’]. Mexico, 4 December 2014.

Martínez, G. (26 September 2020). Albergue DIF en Tijuana, una casa del horror. La Jornada. https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/estados/alberguedif-en-tijuana-una-casa-del-horror%20%20%20 Morelos, R. (26 September 2020). Se amotinan jóvenes del DIF en Temixco; controlan revuelta. La Jornada. https://www.jornada.com.mx/ultimas/ estados/2020/09/02/se-amotinan-jovenes-del-dif-en-temixco-controlanrevuelta-9303.html RELAF and UNICEF. (2011). Guide to standards for the personnel of public and private entities dealing with the protection of the rights of children and adolescents. Applying the United Nations Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children, Buenos Aires, Argentina: RELAF and UNICEF. UNICEF Mexico (2019). Office of the Procurator for Child Protection. Report on cost and proposals for strengthening. Mexico: UNICEF Mexico

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T he right belongs and must belong to children: points for reflection on shaping sport as a human right

By Liber Benítez

Based specifically on children’s football in Uruguay, this article will attempt to expound upon the risks of naturalization and neutralization that considering sport as a fundamental human right implies. What we shall present here is framed within the results of research conducted on ‘Children’s football and children’s government. From the National Commission for Baby Football to the National Organization for Children’s Football in Uruguay (1968-2015)’.1 Thinking about the impact of sport at national and international level is something that does not appear to lead to two different visions. It is, undoubtedly, very high.

1 Based on the analysis of official sources, this study attempted to identify methods, practices, foundations, what has been said and what has not been said in the historical development of children’s football in Uruguay. Although it is recognized that children’s football takes place in areas beyond those regulated by the governing body (spontaneous matches, tournaments promoted by the formal education system, private or community matches that escape the exclusive leadership of the State’s governing body for children’s football), the research focuses on the historical journey of the CNBF/ONFI as a policy anchored in the State, which brings together leagues and clubs from all over the country, maintaining its direct dependence on the State and its explicit intervention, as from 1968.

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As regards football played by boys and girls in Uruguay (including only the State organization), the sport has spread throughout the country since 1968, with official records showing more than 48,000 boys and girls playing this sport today. However, when we attempt a review from the point of view of what I have called the ‘numbering’ of children, the studies seem to hide behind the idea that sport is a fundamental human right.

The intention of this article is to bring into public discussion some of the elements that come into play after the naturalization and neutralization of the sport as being educational, healthy and inclusive and the emerging risks of placing the focus on the practice-tool while it is becoming increasingly and markedly consolidated as a human right. Without attempting to deny this, we suggest reflecting on the place that can be configured once children are no longer thought of in the framework of the practice of a sport, in order to consolidate a global sport, neutralized and naturalized in its quality as a human right.

Sport as the concern of the State Uruguayan children’s football, organized and as a concern of the State, has existed since 1968, with the creation of the National Baby Football Commission (CNBF for its acronym in Spanish), as it was called. Football became installed in the emotional mindset of Uruguayans, mainly due to the sporting achievements of the national football team (and their discontinuance), with the closest reference being the 1950 world championship (Bayce, 1983).

In a national context, in a climate of social and political tension in the country,2 the CNBF was formed by decree No. 635, dated

2 Álvaro Rico describes the period between 1968 and 1973 as a democratic path toward the dictatorship in Uruguay, or towards the degeneration of democracy, in which a series of ‘of contradictory processes and the internal degradation of political institutions, the rule of law, democracy and the ruling class take place, disrupting the very institutional order that

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24 October, answering to the National Physical Education Commission (CNEF for its acronym in Spanish) as the regulator of physical education, sport and recreation, under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture. Based on the idea that Baby Football (BF), and subsequently, Children’s Football (CF), is a beneficial activity for the physical and moral education of children, it is considered that its practice should be encouraged and regulated by the State.

With this explicit concern on the part of State, together with the creation of the CNBF in 1968, a particular way of understanding and denoting children and sport, and, therefore, their relationships and governance, emerged. Internationally and locally, a field was opened to be governed by State policy, based on a reference to and support of universal manifestos and charters that were moving towards understanding sport as a human right.3 At the same time, sporting experiences at the international level entailed a form of display window to show the country to the world at large (Morales, 2013). As far as we can say, BF in Uruguay cannot be detached neutrally from the global process that international federative entities (in this case, FIFA) was proposing for sport (and in particular, football).4 Institutionally (as regards BF/CF in Uruguay), we can mark a history that despite the contextual periods of the country, would seem to maintain its specificity in direct relation to a universe of sport practices and consumption available and socially accepted at a given time. Different historical, cultural, political and institutional processes, the new State structures and the they compose’ (Rico, 2005: 44). Of particular note were the so-called medidas prontas de seguridad [‘immediate security measures’], through which, under the direct presence of the State’s repressive apparatus, it was attempted to maintain order; the government’s clashes with the workers’ union and student movements, among other actors, marked the government’s repressive strategy.

3 Sport Manifesto (2015) and International Charter on Physical Education and Sport, adopted by the 20th General Conference (1978) which defines sport as a fundamental right for all.

4 Direct analogies were found in the research regarding the roles that the CNBF would play for children and BF as a sport, to the point of identifying the commission’s task as that of the children’s AUF, with reference to the Uruguayan Football Association (AUF for its acronym in Spanish), a member of FIFA since 1923 (CNEF, 1968. L83/A69).

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different positions of the social movements linked to the rights of children led to the CNBF being renamed ONFI (National Organization for Children’s Football) in 2001, thus removing the English word ‘baby’ and bringing it into line with the Spanish language, and also, as described in decree 81/001 of 8 March 2001, referring more appropriately to the age group that the sport includes: boys and girls from 6 to 13 years of age. This change coincided with the creation, by Law No. 17,243 of 29 June 2000, of the National Sports Directorate, in the proposed new framework of the Ministry of Sport and Youth (which no longer exists as such), which included within its functions the then CNBF and the tasks that the CNEF fulfilled as the regulatory body for sport, physical education and recreation in the country (2001-2005). Currently, after a passage through the Ministry of Tourism and Sport (2005 - 2015), ONFI is under the orbit of the National Sports Secretariat (SND) created by Law No. 19,331, enacted on 20 July 2015, placing the Secretariat in a direct relationship with the Presidency of the Republic. What is striking and paradoxical at the moment is that the ONFI falls under the federated sports area of the SND, despite the possibilities that emerge from some opinions, present in the organization, that it should be linked to the area of educational sport or community sport in the same secretariat. Assuming then, a narrative that can be posed as an ‘offer aimed at matching a certain social demand’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 193).

Sport in national and international views In this sense, and according to what we have said so far, it is worth highlighting at least two elements that are key to the reflections intended for this article, since they will allow us to think about the tension of sport that has become a practice to protect, over and above children as holders of rights.

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Firstly, there are many discourses circulating around CF in Uruguay, as well as ambiguities and tensions caused by the concentration of institutions and institutionalities in its governance, making it one of the most popular phenomena in the country. We can say, therefore, that CF is a popular practice that reaches a large number of children and is recognized as a central element by the different actors related to football and public policy for Uruguayan children. Therefore, it is important to reflect on the place that CF policies occupy in the participation of micro-power containment networks that, through the configuration of different mechanisms, reproduce and transmit a social structure (Fleury, 2002). At the same time, it is necessary to understand their role in the development of citizenship ‘as a result of citizenship-forming practices’ (Llobet, 2010: 2). Thus, talking about football as a citizenship-forming practice cannot be isolated from understanding football as a socially constructed phenomenon. A construct that contains and configures cultural expressions, and entails areas of dispute that bring together mainly economic and political interests. In the words of Alabarces (2003): a field of symbolic dispute where various actors concur who seek, even unconsciously, to define the ‘true’ meanings on which their identity is based as individuals and as a social group. To that extent, football would also be a scene of conflict between social groups that seek to impose their meanings on others with whom they are in competition and, therefore, a scenario where hegemony is disputed (Alabarces, 2003:28).

The study of CF cannot be unrelated to the place of football as a widespread cultural practice, which in turn is part of sport as a modern phenomenon. As a social and cultural construct, it cannot be detached a-historically from the context from which it emerges. In this sense, the notion of habitus proposed by

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Bourdieu (2007) enables us to rethink the relationship between CF and modern sport as a structuring and structured structure that acts as a backdrop to practices in the manner of a universal language. A kind of universal language that imposes itself as being essentializing or natural, and which involves body uses and languages as a particular selection of significant meanings within the framework of daily experience (Galak, 2007).

Secondly, it should be noted that this is where State policies, directly associating, or essentializing sport as a human right (the rights of children in particular in the case of CF), propose forms of regulation that can limit children’s sport to a reintroduction of adult sport-related discourse as a way of sustaining hegemonic discourses without recognizing their unequal basis. In this way, an analysis cannot ignore the relationship and rise of the sport phenomenon with the expansionism of English capital and the context that installed capitalism as a global economic system.

Today football, in the name of sport, could be considered the greatest secular mass ritual, being seen by social and cultural studies on sport as one of the main producers of nationality in nation-States (Alabarces, 1998).

As a social and cultural configuration, football is changing and multifaceted, although it is self-proclaimed as universal and globalized, a characteristic that emerges from the influence of international and transnational organizations that identify the phenomenon of football at the federative level. FIFA, on the basis of regulations and statutes drawn up in a parastatal manner, shapes the main lines of development and proposes political, economic and social lines of action that must be fulfilled by the nation-States of member federations in order to be part of this international body.

As a starting point, then, football as a sport in our country, has since 1923 been governed by the relationship between the Uruguayan Football Association (AUF) – a private parastatal 104

body – and FIFA. The possibility for the State to intervene directly in football for children is a breaking point, which at the discursive level enables a new way of understanding and signifying football. And in that same possibility lies its greatest challenge and tension; namely: the possibility of thinking about it as a social policy, beyond the phenomenon of being a seedbed for the sport,5 as a selection process of the minority that succeeds in playing the sport professionally, in which, inevitably, any policy related to football is confronted by its level of globalization and marketability.

In countries where FIFA is the reference regarding the regulation of football, football played by boys and girls is the domain of federations or private organizations and these are generally associated with business policies and interests that are part of the global phenomenon. In this way, the large schools of professional clubs, sport clinics and sports training camps for boys and girls appear as one of the mechanisms that guarantees the practice of football on the playing field, as well as the practice of its consumption. Generally, these areas tend to reproduce and impose this form of relating to the sport, assuming this format as the only one possible if one is to be part of the world of football. However, how can a specific practice 5 The term seedbed or quarry in relation to sport is used in Spanish to refer to the process in which people start training in a sport, when the purpose is ultimately to generate a broad base from which the sport at a professional level can choose its sport talents. Therefore, these sessions become opportunities for classifying people generally as future professional athletes or amateur athletes. In this sense, the explicit tension between sport management and public social policy for children tends to be a pendulum oscillation parameter from which the decisions made by the actors executing policies mark the defined priority. This leads to two concerns that were addressed throughout the study. On the one hand, when social inclusion policies refer to sport, this becomes a tool. At that moment sport is set aside as an important part of the device to be reviewed and becomes naturalized as something positive and essentially educational, or that one can load with good or bad intentions according to the existing wishes of the implementers of the policy in question, regardless of the contexts in which it is generated. And on the other hand, when sport is taken as a cultural practice, it is generally reduced to the already stipulated forms of organizing and understanding sport, where the notion of sport seedbed prevails to mark the path of those who may or may not become professional athletes (federations, clubs, or replicas of the former in new areas that become marginal to the former or engulfed by them depending on their success). Thus, depending on the proposed approach, sport can shift from being a panacea that prevents all social ills, to being the bread and circus generated by the political system, causing a sort of ideological contradiction, which far from being one, constitutes a necessary relationship so that the sport phenomenon remains in force without major transformations beyond those proposed by the actors that make up the decision-making area in the field of sport (Bayce, 1983).

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such as sport become a human right to be guaranteed? Can personified sport become a holder of rights on the basis of the dimensions it must be afforded and the guarantees it must be awarded?

Part of the answer appears in the following reference: High-level sport and sport that is practised by all must be protected against any deviation.6 The serious threats to its moral values, image and prestige posed by certain events involving violence, doping and commercial excesses distort its very nature and alter its educational and health function (UNESCO, 1978: no/p).7 In line with and referring to the period of time between 1985 and 1999, the BF journal stated that the ‘National BF Commission positioned itself as the largest national sport body, the most national of all entities and an absolutely essential reality to preserve the values of Uruguayan football’ (MDJ, 2000. R257/68, 31/7). It is evident there that the important issue is to preserve the values of Uruguayan football, not so much of BF, as at the beginning of its management period. What it is proposed to preserve is sport, as a pre-established order, a model of economic development within the framework of modernity and the necessary transformations of the capitalist system (Paula de Melo, 2015).

From a reading of the ONFI’s operating regulations, returning to the idea initially proposed by the CNBF (CNEF-CNBF, 1976) and which is present in all of the statutes of the organization, it is possible to observe that interest in the sport is invariable when it is stated that the ONFI may ‘Agree, sponsor or negotiate with any entity, public or private, all those activities that are deemed to be convenient for its best development’ (ONFI, 2015. E). And

6 Highlighted by the author.

7 This personification of sport as an object of defence was eliminated from the update to the charter in 2015. But it remains valid throughout the period studied as a global approach to sport by the UN and its specialists.

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the development of the sport organization takes precedence.

According to Barbero (1993), the idea that sport is culture is an obvious one, and it is boosted by official rhetorical positions according to which sport is clearly the way out of social ills. It is health, it is a tool for the development of world peace, it is a tool for economic development (in spite of the paradox arising when compared with the previous position), it is educational and it helps to occupy misused free time (should a good use be possible) and moreover, on the basis of the work of national governments, in tune with international agencies, it should meet the most diverse objectives proposed. Professional culture has also contributed to maintaining and at times recreating a positive conception of sport. This notion can be seen in the educationalization of sport excesses, among which extreme competition, economic and political interests, doping and cheating stand out. Elements that distort the true nature of sport from the exterior or from external rationales (if there were a boundary between internal and external). However, we may be confronted with the opposite effect when what is cultural becomes an ideological justification of discourse and ‘suggests that reflection on the processes of its past and present construction is unnecessary (and deviated) and avoids all kinds of questions relating to the social and historical basis of sport practices’ (Barbero, 1993: 11), including practices promoted by sport bodies themselves.

In the case of BF/CF, by more or less consciously or unconsciously direct reference, or simply because it is seen under the umbrella that encompasses sport as a universal paradigm, it has travelled the poles ranging from high-performance sport to the intention of democratizing the practice of sport to all of the inhabitants of the national territory, to be founded and sustained over time. Discourse appears that accounts for the various views that justify genuine and invariable concern for the sport

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organization that has been honouring champions from 1968 to date. This generates insurmountable contradictions that should be identified. On the basis of the documents analysed, we can arrive at a definition of the CNBF/ONFI as a State federation, which includes leagues and clubs, which organizes national championships and which acts as the governing body for the league championships in the regulatory field, and which, in the different public and private ways of obtaining funds, has sought to be represented as the governing institution for BF/CF (Benítez, 2020).

Thus, an endless number of actions necessary for the development of the organization, such as agreeing with private institutions as part of its development, have been validated by regulation (ONFI, 2015. E). Including, too, the organization of championships (local and regional), BF/CF world championships, etc. In this way, differences begin to emerge marking the rights of children and adolescents as a focal point, and when these become the foundation that safeguards the values of Uruguayan football (MDJ, 2000. R257/68, 31/7).

The strongest link in the ONFI operating regulations to the rights of children and adolescents appears in the ONFI’s duties. They include ‘Organizing, encouraging and directing the improvement of their institutions, encouraging the realization of training courses for leaders, technical advisors, referees and parents’ (ONFI, 2015. E) with the intention of promoting the improvement of children’s football and the education of children. While this concept aimed at improving the conditions of practice may have a significant and fundamental scope, it encounters the same symbolic limitations imposed by a longstanding sport system that far exceeds the system regulated by the governing body for BF/CF. It takes on generic attributions without delimiting the feasibility of such purposes. In fact, the regulations and operating conditions of the CNBF/ONFI do not

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include much discussion about the education of children. Rather, they focus on improving CF as a sport that locally reproduces a social order that is reaffirmed in the universal discourses that uphold it as a human right. Without the need for reflections on the structural-global basis of the sport system (Paula de Melo, 2015).

At the same time, the organization highlights the role that refers to ‘Establishing the conditions, categories and forms of competing in children’s football throughout the country, seeking the participation of children of both sexes without distinction of any kind on racial, political or religious grounds’ (ONFI, 2015. E).

It is evident, to the extent that there is no other reference in the ONFI’s statutes or operating regulations, that the participation of boys and girls is reduced to the alleged apoliticality and ideological unification that is proposed within the boundaries of the playing field and to the forms of competition provided for by the organization throughout its history.

Final Considerations Both in national policy-based sport programmes and in international organizations, in the broad sense that is handled when referring to this sport, the invisibility is apparent of the only ideology proposed as universal and functional, that of the naturalization of the established order; that of the end of ideology (Jameson, 1991). In this regard and in the case of sport, Hernández and Carballo (2002), state that a divorce from history and uncriticalism are two sides of the same coin of sport as a naturalized universal ideal.

However, we should stop here and analyse the supposed naivety attributed to this, since the assumption is not a denial of the ideological features of sport as a social experience, but

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the affirmation of an ideal dimension, only apparently free of an ideological background. It is a discourse similar to that of the death of ideologies: it is not about the disappearance of ideologies, but about the hegemony of a single one, which because it is unique becomes ‘invisible’. (Hernández y Carballo 2002: 93).

Therefore, naturalized universal discourses are functional to the political and economic systems that regulate any possibility of divergence, obtaining and strengthening unanimity and consensus. Diluting or masking in this way ‘the conflicts of power and interests that are always at stake behind every (sporting) initiative’ (Barbero, 1993: 11). Thinking about social development is an imperative for Latin American peoples when attempting to reach lower levels of inequality and higher levels of democracy. The problem often lies in the fact that in the name of human rights and government practices apparently based

Liber Benítez Research professor at the Physical Education and Sport academic department of the Higher Institute of Physical Education - University of the Republic of Uruguay (UdelaR). Co-Head of the Group on Social and Cultural Studies on Sport (Sectoral Commission for Scientific Research - UdelaR). Coordinator of the project Towards the formation of the first children’s football observatory in Uruguay (Sectoral Commission for Outreach and Activities in the UdelaR Environment - National Children’s Football Organization 2017-2019). Coordinator of the bachelor’s degree in physical education, UdelaR, Higher Institute of Physical Education (2015-2016). Master’s degree in Child Rights and Public Policy (UdelaR). Specialist in Child Rights and Public Policy (UdelaR) and in Public Policy for Equality in Latin America (Latin American Council of Social Sciences). Lecturer in the area of education at the Higher Institute of Physical Education - IMEF Uruguay). E-mail: liberbenitez.86@gmail.com

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on them (through the international discourses that evoke and sustain them), statements referring to education, participation, development, without reflection on the meanings that constitute and make up the objective – education, participation and development – are emptied of meaning (Frigerio, et al., 2009).

Children become doubly invisible. On the one hand, in the face of the national sport, which makes them the recipients of sport practices and contests adhering to the rationale of competition, while at the same time, providing a basis for achieving the aggrandisement of the sport. And on the other, in the face of the universals that place sport as the subject of their statements, as a practice that must be protected above the interests of boys and girls who practice the sport. The risks are clear, either sport is saved or it is ensured that a rights-based perspective may in some way challenge the practice of sport.

Bibliography Alabarces, P. (1998). ¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de deporte?. In Nueva Sociedad, (154), 74 - 86. Retrieved from (https://www.nuso.org/ media/articles/downloads/2669_1.pdf).

Alabarces, P. (2003). Futbologías. Fútbol, identidad y violencia en América Latina. Buenos Aires, Argentina: CLACSO. Barbero, J. I. (1993). Introduction. In: Barbero, J. I. (editor), Materiales de Sociología del deporte. 9 - 38. Madrid, Spain: Ediciones de la Piqueta.

Bayce, R. (1983). Deporte y Sociedad. In Centro Latinoamericano de Economía Humana, El Uruguay de nuestro tiempo, 1958 - 1983, (3), 49 - 72.

Benítez, L. (2020). Fútbol infantil y gobierno de la infancia. De la Comisión Nacional de Baby Fútbol a la Organización Nacional del Fútbol Infantil (19682015). (Master’s degree thesis) University of the Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay.

Bourdieu, P. (1990). Sociología y cultura. Federal District, Mexico: Editorial Grijalbo.

Bourdieu, P. (2007). El sentido Práctico. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo Veintiuno Editores.

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Fleury, S. (2002). Políticas Sociales y Ciudadanía. In: Umbrales, Revista del Postgrado en Ciencias del Desarrollo, (11), 189-218.

Frigerio, G., Diker, G., y Mendoza, S. (2009). Los proyectos de inclusión educativa y la problemática de su evaluación. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Programa EURO social-Educación, Proyecto ‘Indicadores y procedimientos para el monitoreo y evaluación de proyectos de inclusión y promoción educativa’.

Galak, E. (2007). La identidad es relacional. Habitus y Ethos en las prácticas corporales. In: Revista Lúdica Pedagógica, 2(13), 82-90, Bogotá, Colombia.

Retrieved from https://eduardogalak.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/ la-identidad-es-relacional-habitus-y-ethos-en-las-practicas-corporaleseduardo-galak.pdf Hernández, N., y Carballo, C. (2002). Acerca del concepto de deporte: alcance de su(s) significado(s). In: Educación Física y Ciencia, year 6, 87-102.

Jameson, F. (1991). Ensayos sobre el posmodernismo. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Imago Mundi.

Llobet, V. (2010). ¿Fábricas de niños? Las instituciones en la era de los derechos. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Centro de Publicaciones Educativas y Material Didáctico.

Morales, A. (2013). Fútbol, identidad y poder: 1916-1930. Montevideo, Uruguay: Editorial Fin de Siglo.

Paula de Melo, M. (2015). Os primórdios do esporte no sistema ONU: I MINEPS (1976) e Carta Internacional de Educação Física (1978). In: Educación Física y Ciencia, 17 (1), 1 – 11. Retrieved from (http://sedici. unlp.edu.ar/bitstream/handle/10915/47762/Documento_completo__. pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y).

Rico, Á. (2005). Cómo nos domina la clase gobernante. Orden político y obediencia social en la democracia posdictadura. Uruguay 1985-2005.

Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones Trilce.

SND (National Sports Secretariat) (n.d.). Deporte Federado. National Sports Secretariat. Retrieved from (https://www.gub.uy/secretaria-nacionaldeporte/deporte-federado).

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) (1978). International Charter of Physical Education and Sport, 1978 UNESCO Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 7, 1979 (In the Minutes of the 20th General Conference, Paris, 24 October - 28 November 1978 Volume 1 Resolutions). Retrieved from (http:// www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/physicaleducation-and-sport/cigeps/).

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) (2015). UNESCO International Charter of Physical Education, Physical Activity and Sport. [s.l.]: UNESCO. Retrieved from (http://unesdoc.unesco. org/images/0023/002354/235409s.pdf).

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Sources CNEF-CNBF, 1976 - National Physical Education Commission - National Baby Football Commission (1976). Regulations and bylaws for the practice of Baby Football.

CNEF, 1968. L83/A69 - National Physical Education Commission, 1968.

Minutes Book 83 / Minutes 69. (12/03/1969) ONFI, 2015 E - ONFI, 2015. General operating rules of the organization.

Ministry of Tourism and Sports First version adopted at the ONFI League Congress on 15 December 2007. Retrieved from http://www.onfi.org.uy/ onfi_mixto/. (10/29/2015).

MDJ, 2000. R257/68, 31/7 - Ministry of Sport and Youth, 2000. Ministerial Resolution 257/68, 31 July 2000.

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T he CENDI model of the ‘Land and Freedom’ People’s Front: T hirty years of lessons in the social transformation of vulnerable populations in Nuevo León, Mexico.

By Bernardo Aguilar

Introduction According to the National Population Council (CONAPO for its acronym in Spanish), just over 13 million children between the ages of 0 and 6 lived in Mexico in 2019, representing 10% of the population. All of these children have the right to life, health, education, development and participation. Unfortunately, today more than half of these children are in poverty, which means not developing fully and therefore being excluded from learning opportunities and access to a decent life. Having these children achieve their harmonious development during their first six years means fulfilling the guarantee of their rights.

While it is true that in recent years, with the adoption of the General Act on the Rights of Children and Adolescents (LGDNNA, in Spanish) in December 2014, the creation of the 114

National System for the Comprehensive Protection of Children and Adolescents (SIPINNA) in 2015, and the constitutional reform of 2019 that recognizes early education to be a right and compels the State to safeguard it, Mexico has made significant progress in adapting its normative and institutional framework relating to the guarantee and fulfilment of children’s rights, it is also true that early childhood care programmes with a more welfare-based approach, often focusing on the mother, and of poor quality, in addition to a lack of budget, among other factors, perpetuates the precarious state of childcare, and in particular, for children under the age of three.

This shows that the great debt owed to the most disadvantaged children of an early age in Mexico is still present and therefore the lessons that have been generated over the last 30 years by the Child Development Centres (CENDI) of the ‘Land and Freedom’ People’s Front are even more relevant.

These CENDIs provide comprehensive quality care services for children under the age of six in marginalized urban areas of the metropolitan area of Monterrey, Nuevo León; for children of working mothers (schooling modality), as well as for those who do not receive any services and live in conditions of poverty (non-schooling modality), in order to harmoniously develop all of their potential.

Currently, there are 13 Child Development Centres, CENDIs, in 5 municipalities of Nuevo León and the model has been replicated in more than 15 states of the Mexican Republic, reaching a coverage of just over 16,000 children in marginalized urban areas.

Through their mission, CENDIs have contributed to the social transformation of vulnerable sectors of the population in the areas where they are located, with a holistic and cultural approach that includes the child, the educator, the family and the community.

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Origins of the CENDI Comprehensive Care Model in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico In order to define the CENDIs and to understand the vision that gave rise to their foundation, it is essential to be aware of the background of the social organization that promoted them; the ‘Land and Freedom’ People’s Front. This social organization emerged in 1972 and defined itself as a promoter of popular power and a support base for social transformation.

CENDIs are the result of a social demand promoted by working mothers, who demanded childcare for their children during their working day. Most of these women joined the informal labour market as a result of their precarious lifestyle.

It was in 1990 that, thanks to the political will of the Federal Government then in power, it became possible to consider including within the ‘Solidarity’ Programme of the Ministry of Social Development, a budget for combating poverty in the marginalized urban areas of Monterrey, known as the ‘Land and Freedom’ territories, where years earlier, in 1976, the urbanpopular movement ‘Land and Freedom’ People’s Front (FPTyL, in Spanish) had been formed, with the alignment of a group of social organizations of possessors (holders of land without a title), small traders, drivers, artisans, blacksmiths and peasants.

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The social and economic environmental conditions surrounding the first CENDIs of the FPTyL, were characterized by serious problems including alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, lack of drinking water and electricity, lack of sanitation, gangs and domestic violence, which made it very difficult to raise, care for and protect the children of ‘Land and Freedom’, an environment that reinforced the reproduction of poverty circle.

Chronic malnutrition, parasitic infections, skin diseases, anaemia, prevalent respiratory diseases, low weight and height, as well as visible delays in children’s socio-emotional and cognitive development, such as behavioural and language problems, were some of the characteristics of the early development of these children, who were excluded from opportunities to learn and achieve the harmonious development of their capacities.

This characterization of the development of children with significant delays, coupled with inappropriate parenting practices in their homes and the conditions of the surrounding social environment, led to the assumption that restricting the mission of the CENDIs to only an institutional educational function, would not enable them to achieve the objectives envisaged for their main social function, which implied promoting the transformation of the surrounding environment, both family and community.

In other words, there was no point in structuring the efficient organization of CENDIs and designing scientifically based educational programmes, if the living environment of these children was not changed, at least to the extent necessary to enable the adequate participation of the family and the community in the key processes of comprehensive care provided by the CENDIs. The CENDIs’ mission is to achieve the highest possible level of development for each child in the socio-emotional, cognitive,

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language, motor development, health, and nutrition dimensions, as well as in the formation of healthy habits. The main way to achieve our mission has been to prepare families to become agents in promoting the development of their children through systematic planned actions, guided by a team composed of doctors, nutritionists, child educators, psychologists and social workers.

The main challenge we have set ourselves has been to design processes and programmes that respond to the needs of children, their families, and the community, in the conviction that, in the face of the most deprived children, care must be comprehensive and of quality, laying the foundations for learning and child development, an indispensable condition for fulfilling the vision of reversing the social circle of reproduction of poverty.

Conceptual and pedagogical foundations of the FPTyL’s CENDI model The conceptual and pedagogical framework of the CENDI model is based on theoretical concepts that recognize the importance of early experiences in the comprehensive development and personality of the child. The positive interaction of boys and girls with their environment, which is understood as the family and the community, is key to their comprehensive and harmonious development. mong the essential pedagogical principles to which we believe quality education must respond is that of being a process in which children are at the centre as protagonists; that is, that the design and deployment of actions for the benefit of children should be based on their needs and interests, encouraging their active and cooperative participation in a harmonious and affective environment.

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This implies an in-depth knowledge of the physiological, psychological, cognitive and physical characteristics of children at the appropriate stage in order to design relevant and effective strategies, guide the family, and train adults to become responsible for their educational care.

One of these pedagogical principles is the active nature of the CENDI in its relations with the family, with a view to influencing the intra-family educational process and achieving the convergence of actions on the training and education of children.

In keeping with this, it has become essential to organize family and community education activities that will make it possible to unify the training and educational work of minors.

Another pedagogical principle followed is the linkage between children’s education and the environment, since at this period of their life they learn, are shaped, and develop through the

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experiences they live through and the direct relationships they establish with the people around them and the public space in their community.

The principles relating to the protagonist role of children, the participation of the family and the community in the educational process, together with an approach involving comprehensiveness, interdisciplinarity and intersectorality are essential characteristics, on which the success of the education and comprehensive care of children 0-6 years of age served by the CENDIs depends.

The CENDIs’ proposal to promote harmonious development and learning in enhanced environments has been strengthened by a pedagogical programme focusing on play, interaction with the environment, music, art, sport, movement and use of technology to encourage maximum cognitive, physical and socio-emotional development.

A central aspect that the CENDIs have been bolstering is the development of the oral language skills that emerge between birth and the age of three as a foundation for literacy and later reading. These concepts are incorporated into the Abecedarian Approach through three basic elements of the educational programme:

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•

learning games

•

conversational reading with a priority on language

•

provision of enhanced care

The theoretical foundations of the Abecedarian Approach are derived from the approaches related to Bruner’s joint attention and the sequencing and evolutionary progression of Piaget and Vygotsky.

The design of programmes at the CENDIs is continuously improved, since outcomes are evaluated and analysed every year, in the light of research studies on neuroscience, pedagogy and child psychology, based on discussions with researchers, academics, scientists and pedagogues from more than 20 countries, whom we have been convening to an International Meeting of Early and Preschool Education in Monterrey, since 2000.

Key care processes for the comprehensive development of the CENDI model Comprehensive care is organized into five key childcare processes: medical, nutritional, pedagogical, psychological, and social work. Each area of care is led by a specialist who

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works daily in an interdisciplinary manner, monitoring and following up on the child’s development, while guiding the family through systematic actions. These professionals form a Technical Council, responsible for ensuring the optimal development of the child.

SOCIAL WORK Foster the integration of CENDIs, families and communities HEALTH Achieve an optimal state of health

KEY PROCESSES

PSYCHOLOGY Encourage children’s harmonious development and emotional balance

PEDAGOGY

NUTRITION

Encourage children’s physical, affective, social and cognitive development

Achieve optimal nutrition for children through adequate nourishment

Institutional framework: CENDI comprehensive care modalities From our perspective, early education and comprehensive early childhood care represent the key that opens the doors to the future and helps to reduce social inequalities. Comprehensive

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quality care is a powerful equalizer to foster the human, social and economic development of the individual, and his/her family and community and helps to reverse the vicious circle of poverty.

The FPTyL’s CENDIs offer their services in two forms of care: The Formal or Institutional Model The service is aimed at the care and education of children of working mothers who live mainly in marginalized communities and to whom 70% of the places are granted; 15% of the places are offered to the children of our own workers as a work benefit and the other 15% is allocated to the general population, those who do not necessarily live in marginalized communities and who choose the service for its high quality.

The Non-Formal Modality: The ‘Learning Together’ Programme The CENDIs follow an inclusive policy of quality and provide their coverage through the ‘Learning Together’ Programme, which targets families with children from zero to six years of age living in the communities adjacent to the CENDIs. This programme has been developed with the following factors

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in mind for its success: • Importance of the principles of equity, relevance and quality.

• Close interaction between the CENDIs’ institutional framework and the non-formal track.

• Health, nutrition, habit formation, socialization, stimulation and education services are coordinated with the guidance of a multidisciplinary team.

• There is a comprehensive, relevant, flexible and adaptable curriculum, with significant content to enhance the comprehensive development of the child.

• Educational action in the home is promoted, supporting families by means of awareness-raising, training and specialized guidance.

• Every child’s comprehensive development is evaluated, measured and monitored.

• Support provided through other strategies within the community action programme to influence the environment in which children live in order to improve their living conditions.

Early Childhood and Preschool Education Programmes and Levels of Care (Transitions) Our institution promotes the healthy and effective transition of children. In this respect, it identifies in a timely manner the needs of each child according to his/her life cycle, evaluates expected development achievements, establishes action plans with clear goals and objectives to achieve the best possible transitions.

CENDI regulations provide for two education programmes 124

according to the age of the child: The Early Education programme (45 days to 3 years) aims to contribute to the harmonious formation and balanced and healthy development of children during the years of early childhood, thus laying the foundations and premises for the qualities and basic skills of this stage of development, which is characterized by the high plasticity of the brain and the formation of neural networks.

The Preschool Education programme (3 to 6 years) provides six training fields: Language and communication, mathematical thinking, personal and social development, physical development and health, artistic expression and appreciation, and exploration and knowledge of the world; developed in fifty skills, which together determine the maturation and preparation of the child for the next level of education and for subsequent learning.

These official programmes have been enhanced over the years through new strategies such as: cocurricular programmes, such as English and computer skills, drawing and modelling, music and dancing, physical education, yoga and karate, which

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provide these children with the opportunity to penetrate areas of their personal preparation that are not commonly available due to financial limitations. There are also educational reinforcement programmes aimed at addressing critical factors in development, such as adaptation, weaning, early stimulation, language therapy, induction to primary school, and others.

Together with these educational programmes, it was deemed necessary to devise extracurricular programmes, understood to be those that are aimed at parents and the community, with the aim of positively affecting the care that they are able to provide to minors enrolled in child development centres, and attempt to reverse as far as possible some of the negative social conditions that affect the surrounding environment where these children develop.

Each level is divided into three sub-levels:

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INFANTS

DAYCARE

PRESCHOOL

Infants I

Daycare I

Preschool I

45 days to 6 months

1.7 to 2 years

3 to 4 years

Infants II

Daycare II

Preschool II

7 to 12 months

2.1 to 2.6 years

4 to 5 years

Infants III

Daycare III

Preschool III

1 year to 1.6 years

2.7 to 3 years

5 to 6 years

Innovative programmes and special services CENDI Applied Neuroscience Centre The CENDIs have an applied neuroscience centre with two programmes: • A neurohabilitation programme for children under the age of one, who are evaluated for risk factors from the prenatal stage and whose development is evaluated for lag factors. An intervention strategy is designed under the coordination of the Neuroscience Centre of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM; and • A neuro rehabilitation programme for children over the age of three who are lagging behind in their development.

Systematic intervention is provided with different therapies and the family is offered guidance and training to support rehabilitation.

Prenatal Education Programme: ‘Building a Better Tomorrow’ Since 2008, a prenatal education programme, ‘Building a Better

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Tomorrow’ has been implemented, based on the contributions of neuroscience, through which it seeks to transform the culture of care and attention of infants before birth, recognizing the risk factors that affect the development of the brain in poor populations. The programme operates according to an interdisciplinary approach, considering that pregnancy is a multifactorial process involving nutritional, environmental, genetic, and psycho-emotional aspects related to the lifestyles of pregnant women.

Activities with pregnant women have been implemented in two weekly sessions of one hour and thirty minutes each. During each session, pregnant women receive support and training from the specialists involved, whose interventions are organized according to the various trimesters of pregnancy and the needs of the group.

Key success factors of a benchmark model and recognition The experience of 30 years of service supported by strict evaluation and research procedures, has allowed us to identify the determining factors for development and learning in

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children; these factors, also known as key success factors of the FTP&L SE NL CENDI Model, are: 1. Comprehensive care from pregnancy with the guidance of a multidisciplinary team.

2. Protection and care, with coordination of health, nutrition, stimulation, education, and socio-emotional development services, respecting the differences in children’s learning rhythms.

3. A comprehensive curriculum focusing on children’s interests, relevant to the cultural context, flexible and adaptable, with relevant content, and that uses play, music and art as a means to learn.

Bernardo Aguiar M. He is an economist and holds a master’s degree in Organization Management and in Quality Management. Since 1998, he has served as Director of Quality and Innovation at the Child Development Centres (CENDI) of the ‘Land and Freedom’ People’s Front of Monterrey and has contributed to obtaining fortyfive quality awards, including the National Quality Award and the Ibero-American Management Excellence Award.

He is an international consultant and an evaluator for the Ibero-American Foundation of Excellence in Management (FUNDIBEQ), a technical advisor to the Hemispheric Network of Parliamentarians and Former Parliamentarians for Early Childhood, and a member of the Network of Leaders for Early Childhood ‘Convergence for Action’. He has produced a number of publications on education quality, has been a guest lecturer at several universities in Latin America and given addresses in more than twenty countries.

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4. Safe and stimulating physical spaces with access to ageappropriate materials, in addition to the use of technology.

5. The quality of interactions fostering healthy emotional bonds and secure attachments.

6. Continuous training and systematic evaluation of teaching performance.

7. A system involving evaluation, tracking and monitoring of every child’s comprehensive development through the indicators and parameters of the Institutional Evaluation System.

8. Promotion of educational action in the home, through awareness-raising, training, support and specialized guidance for parents.

9. A Community Action Programme to make a difference to the environment in which children live, in order to improve their living conditions.

Since 2004, the CENDIs have provided support to graduates, in addition to promoting a systematic external evaluation of the quality of their care processes. In 2007, a child development impact assessment was conducted by McMaster University, Canada, through the Early Development Instrument (EDI).

Currently, the CENDI model is being expanded to also offer comprehensive primary education services (from 6 to 12 years), with great success in learning outcomes.

To date, the CENDIs have received 45 quality awards, including the National Quality Award, the Ibero-American Quality Award and the Asia-Pacific International Quality Award, and in 2013 they were selected by the OECD, in its inventory of best practices in early childhood care, as part of the ‘Innovative Learning Environment Project’ (ILE).

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In summary, the CENDIs are evidence of the social transformation of vulnerable sectors of the population through the holistic and cultural approach, which includes children, educators, families and community, to contribute to a more just and equitable society.

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