ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, child law has become a discrete category of legal practice and academic study, notably distinct from family law. This development can be understood as a simple process of consolidation of issues relating to children across a number of more established legal categories and, in addition, as a reflection of increased specialisation and juridification. More broadly, and perhaps optimistically, this development can also be understood as a reflection of the influence of children’s rights and feminist engagements with law which, albeit in different ways, have to a limited extent encouraged a ‘child-centred’ focus wherein children are seen as individuals and not simply as family members or passive ‘objects of concern’. Yet, more critically, the development of child law can be understood as a reflection not simply of heightened social and political concern for children, but, less tangibly and more problematically, as a reflection of an increase in the importance of childhood as a category of cultural and governmental significance for society as a whole. These various explanations indicate that child law is more than a ‘common sense’ category. Significantly, it is far more than simply the law relating to children, which is to say that ‘law’ is not merely functional and descriptive and that the ‘child’ is not always easily identifiable; rather, it is a complex and frequently contested and continually shifting discursive construction.
