South American Childhoods since the 1990s: Neoliberalisation and the Exercise of Children?s Rights

VERGARA DEL SOLAR, ANA; NASCIMENTO LETICIA; LLOBET, VALERIA

Palgrave McMillan

978-987-8326-33-7

This compilation proposal presents reflections on the situation of childhood in South America since the 1990s. The period has particular sociological interest in its implications for childhood, firstly due to the consolidation of neoliberalisation processes that began within the framework of United States-supported civil-military dictatorships that had recently relinquished power. Second, during this period each of the countries in the region ratified the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Beginning in the 1990s, these two processes led to a paradoxical situation: a growing number of states, characterized by predominantly authoritarian practices and intent on shedding responsibilities for social welfare, found themselves expected to be guarantors of the social rights of children as well as their rights to protection and participation. This juxtaposition has generated contexts in which tensions exist between logics and processes of very dissimilar aim and intention.Within this context, how children?s rights were institutionalised and vernacularised locally (Merry, 2003) deserves in depth examination, being a phenomenon that was contemporaneous with Washington consensus-inspired reforms of the state. On the one hand, while in some countries absolute poverty has decreased, in most the socio-economic gap between adults and children and between children themselves has widened, reflecting setbacks in the exercise of rights and in what has been termed the "age-based welfare imbalance" (Rossel, 2013). At the same time, the meaning of public education and health has changed and families have been placed in the position of being mainly, and in practice almost solely, responsible for their children?s welfare.