Wars and Invisible Girls, Shadow Industries, and the Politics of Not-Knowing

Abstract

This article begins in the interior of Mozambique during the country's post-independence war with the stories of three girls variously affected by violence. It then follows girls' war experiences in general out from the frontlines to wider international locales where girls face domestic violence in their home communities and civil and labor violence at the hands of (shadow) transnational profiteers; who reap billions of dollars yearly on children's factory, domestic, and sexual labor. The article is set in an overall theoretical framework that explores how a politics of invisibility - literally of 'not-knowing' - has developed in which little public information is available on children's human rights violations or on the political tactics and economic gain that have attended to these violations.