Lost Childhood? Visualizing a Heterogeneous Discourse of Child Labor

Abstract

This project aims to consider the epistemological benefits of implementing creative visual methods to study the increasing phenomenon of child labor from a critical constructivist point of view. I contend the devilizing colonized vision of child labor, together with the increasing efforts to protect the privacy and intimacy of infants have silenced and misrepresented the voice of child workers. The project’s goal is to imagine these children differently. In a first part of this review, I contend that artificial views of children picturing them as innocent passive objects have been universally assumed. This discourse has been propelled by Eurocentric INGO, mass communication platforms and legal standards to strengthen the conceptualization of children as physically and psychologically immature. In a second step, I review and analyze the critics of a film based on this constructionist view of childhood: Capernaum, by Nadine Labaki. Following the multiple adversities a child worker faces in the slums of Beirut, the Lebanese director covers the topic of “lost childhood” or, in this case, a childhood that was stolen by the child’s parents. As I prove, Labaki takes for granted the existence of a “universal child” who is innocent and pure. Finally, in the last part of the review, I study the multiple ethical challenges faced by scholars while filming children. I argue that the voices of children that work have been doubly marginalized. Being traditionally portrayed by global institutions as passive victims of an exploitative discriminatory phenomenon driven by unscrupulous and uncivilized adults that take advantage of their vulnerability and subrogating them to their parents’ consent to speak out loud. To empower these children’s subjecthood, I propose to unmute them applying a critical framework to the way researchers see and listen to them by taking into account the different approaches of childhood and calling into question the objectification of child workers.