The child refugee in Calais: from invisibility to the \u2018suspect figure\u2019

Yasmin Ibrahim

doi:10.1186/s41018-020-00087-z

Abstract

This paper examines child refugees in the context of Calais in France, contextualizing them against the politics of the ‘Jungle’ (a makeshift camp) in policy and media discourses in the UK by delineating three distinct phases in the discursive production of these sites in the enactment of this ambiguous entity. These three phases trace the spatio-temporal emergence of the child refugee in the camps to their arrival in the UK. These camps, as transient and symbolic formations inhabited by the ‘dispossessed’ of forced global migration, provide a context in which the figure of the child is enacted from its incidental appearance to its visible manifestation to its final configuration as the ‘suspect figure’ in the UK. Through Derridean ‘hauntology’ of absent presence, the child refugee captures the conflicted morality of the West. As a disenfranchised entity, the child, forged through the turbulence of the Jungle, can be collapsed through the primal and deprived of his or her status as a child (and, in tandem, protection from harm) in public discourses. The child positioned as a ‘suspect figure’ becomes a spectral reflection of the beleaguered West, wrestling with the ideational image of the child and its recurrence as a threat to its moral reserve.

Highlights

Child refugees and unaccompanied children are problematic within the phenomenon of forced migration globally (Bhabha 2004; Derluyn and Broekaert 2008; Lems et al 2020; Boyden and Hart 2007; Doná and Veale 2011)
This paper reviewed the construction of the child refugee in Calais
It traced their depiction in media discourses and policy responses through the refugee camps in Calais from 2002 till June 2018 through three distinct phases from their incidental appearance, visible presence, to their arrival in the UK as material entities

Summary

Introduction

Child refugees and unaccompanied children are problematic within the phenomenon of forced migration globally (Bhabha 2004; Derluyn and Broekaert 2008; Lems et al 2020; Boyden and Hart 2007; Doná and Veale 2011). Born from the wombs of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998), devoid of human rights in the border politics between France and the UK, subjected to the violence of sovereign states and resurrected through the pitiful camps of the Jungle, the Calais child is an anomalous entity tapping both into the primal and visceral politics of migration as well as the contested morality of according children protection from harm in a developed polity.

Results

Conclusion