TY  - JOUR
A1  - McLaughlin, Carly
T1  - They don’t look like children
BT  - child asylum-seekers, the Dubs amendment and the politics of childhood
JF  - Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
N2  - In October 2016, following a campaign led by Labour Peer Lord Alfred Dubs, the first child asylum-seekers allowed entry to the UK under new legislation (the ‘Dubs amendment’) arrived in England. Their arrival was captured by a heavy media presence, and very quickly doubts were raised by right-wing tabloids and politicians about their age. In this article, I explore the arguments underpinning the Dubs campaign and the media coverage of the children’s arrival as a starting point for interrogating representational practices around children who seek asylum. I illustrate how the campaign was premised on a universal politics of childhood that inadvertently laid down the terms on which these children would be given protection, namely their innocence.
The universality of childhood fuels public sympathy for child asylum-seekers, underlies the ‘child first, migrant second’ approach advocated by humanitarian organisations, and it was a key argument in the ‘Dubs amendment’. Yet the campaign highlights how representations of child asylum-seekers rely on codes that operate to identify ‘unchildlike’ children. As I show, in the context of the criminalisation of undocumented migrants‘, childhood is no longer a stable category which guarantees protection, but is subject to scrutiny and suspicion and can, ultimately, be disproved.
KW  - Politics of childhood
KW  - child asylum-seekers
KW  - innocence
KW  - humanitarianism;
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1417027
SN  - 1369-183X
SN  - 1469-9451
VL  - 44
IS  - 11
SP  - 1757
EP  - 1773
PB  - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -