ABSTRACT
In any civilised society the child should be afforded protection from suffering. On this premise legal and social safeguards within and across states have sought to ensure the wellbeing of children, to attempt to place them beyond harm’s way and to offer therapeutic support wherever possible for those who have been subjected to harm and abuse. There is little doubt about the commitment and genuine desire behind the creation and implementation of these norms by those who seek to ameliorate the suffering of children through various institutional and organisational means, be they policing initiatives, social service provisions, non-governmental victim rehabilitation schemes and so on. However, as mentioned in earlier chapters, the perception of the child, of her status in the context of trafficking and the appropriate responses to victimisation are riven with complexities. A prominent narrative, and one that this book subscribes to – up to a point – is a story of lack and non-capacity, of mismatched and non-joined up initiatives, of grand aspirations and pitiful outcomes, of law’s internationalising, universalising norms and definitions coupled with its narrow circumscription of the world. Yet, emerging from the edges of this narrative, is a series of disturbances: multiple identities of the victim, from passive, vulnerable, at risk to the securitised ‘risky’ subject, tangled in the imbrications of humanitarian and securitisation interventions (Aradau 2004) that unsettle the simplistic binary of criminal–victim. This is especially evident in the case of groups and cultures located peripherally to the dominant ideology, those who stand apart from, or whose presence shifts between and thus challenges, the discursive and legal formulations that provide the basis of international humanitarian instruments and interventions. Rights, children’s rights – Romania ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990 – ‘victim’s rights’, modest supplement in the UN Trafficking Protocol, enhanced in European ‘human rights’ anti-trafficking measures, stand at the fulcrum of activity around victim protections of adults and children. Nor, and very much at the same time in the post-communist, preaccession and post-accession Romanian domain, can we forget the sudden emergence of minority rights of Romani people. For van Baar, the specific mode in which this nexus is configured since the 1990s is a governmentalisation of rights 166by the EU, not least in its pre-accession pressures on good governance criteria as conditions of membership (van Baar 2011: 181) and the incentivising funding from the World Bank. From this perspective the gap between policy formation and implementation is not so much, or not only, success or failure but the question of effects (Van Baar 2011: 194–195). Thus the question – who is being protected, and from what?
