“Are There Any Children for Sale?”: Genocide and the Transfer of Armenian Children (1915–1922)

Abstract

The forced transfer of children from one group to another is considered an element of the crime of genocide, yet this subject has attracted little scholarly attention. Using the history of the mass transfer of Armenian children during the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1922 as a case, this article argues that the study of child transfer and recovery is critical to both the history of human rights and a more sophisticated understanding of genocide, including the forms of genocide accompanying the colonial encounter. The experience of transferred children and their recovery or loss can help better clarify the historical relationship between the concepts of the rights of the child and individual human and minority rights as these have evolved before and immediately after World War II. Moreover, this article also contends that it is important to characterize child transfer as genocide, as opposed to colonial assimilation or acculturation as a feature of modernization, when explaining the broader social impact of mass violence, forced migration, and cultural destruction on victim/survivor and perpetrator communities.