Child Fostering or Child Trafficking: Questioning Justifications for Children’s Departure from Home

West African countries adopt child fostering or kinship placement as a traditional form of social protection that balances care and support for families with limited resources, experiencing unforeseen setbacks; or requiring household support. The traditional kinship placement advocates the provision of nurturing and education for the child by the fostering family. However, the traditional kinship placement appears exploited with children taken away from their homes, by such familiar persons as relatives and family friends, who may or may not fulfill the traditional expectations of fostering. The aftermath is that based on the mistreatment experienced by several children, they are removed from their kinship placement and placed in agency care as survivors of trafficking. This again prompts the question of whether children removed from kinship placement should be considered trafficked children. This paper explores this situation by presenting the experiences of some children in kinship placement in Nigeria. Children’s narratives within the paper will provide a further understanding of how child fostering or placement could transform into child trafficking that will inform services provided to affected children.

Moral navigation and child fostering in Chiawa, Zambia

This article explores the movement of children between households in Zambia as a site of ‘moral navigation’. Moral navigation extends Henrik Vigh's concept of social navigation from contexts of conflict and migration to more socially stable contexts in which well-being depends critically on people's ability to manage relationships. The live, dynamic and mobile character of these relationships means that they require active, real-time cultivation and response. While having practical objectives, these negotiations are also moral, articulated with ideas of what ought to be, and seeking to fulfil sometimes competing ethical projects. Life history interviews present three main perspectives: recollections of times in childhood spent away from birth parents; birth parents’ reflections on having a child living with others; and adults’ accounts of taking in other people's children. Strong norms of kinship unity and solidarity notwithstanding, in practice terms of engagement are differentiated through gender, marital, social and economic status, plus relational and geographical proximity. The pursuit of personal benefit contains the seeds of both contradiction and convergence with the collective good, as a relational understanding of moral selves sees one's own gain as proper, rightful and virtuous when it is realized in and through providing for others.

Consumption Inequality Among Children: Evidence from Child Fostering in Malawi*

The share of household resources devoted to a child may depend on their gender, birth order, or relationship to the household head. However, it is challenging to determine whether parents favour certain children over others as consumption data is collected at the household level and goods are shared among family members. I develop a new methodology using the collective household framework to identify consumption inequality between different types of children. I apply this method to child fostering in Malawi. I find little evidence of inequality between foster and non-foster children.

“You are not normal, you are against nature”

This paper examines the media representations of scandalous parliamentary talk on same-sex child fostering in the discourses of representatives of the radical-right Golden Dawn party in Greece, but also by an MP of the conservative ANEL party of the SYRIZA-ANEL joint government at the time. Through discourse- and conversation analysis of online articles and a broadcast interview, it is shown that the media framing of populist statements is negotiated. Moreover, the interview enacts a subtly achieved interactional synergy between the interviewer and the politician, thus failing to address the issues through substantive public dialogue. It is argued that the process of (re)mediating racist or homophobic talk has the potential to serve as a publicity tool creating increased visibility for right-wing populist politicians, their core ideologies and policy platforms. This creates a challenge for practitioners of journalism who must balance disparate concerns in reporting on scandalous talk.

Transnational migration, health and well-being: Nigerian parents in Ireland and the Netherlands

The phenomenon of families separated across continents is a result of migratory flows in a globalised world. Transnational families occur because one or both parents migrate internationally requiring children to be raised in transnational child-raising arrangements, with the help of caregivers. This study examines the health and the emotional well-being of Nigerian migrant parents living in Ireland and the Netherlands, using comparative analyses based on a survey of close to 300 migrant parents in each host country. Half of the sample in each country is living in transnational families the other half are not. This paper adds to the existing literature on transnational families by including control groups (migrants who are not separated from their children) and comparing migrant parents from the same origin country who live in different host countries, allowing us to identify the significance of migratory context and legal regimes in shaping the emotional well-being and health of parents. The results indicate that the factors that drive the health and emotional well-being of migrant parents are not solely related to their separation from their children but rather to other mediating variables such as legal status, socio-economic status, and the normative contexts. While Nigerian child fostering norms ease the influence of separation in both contexts, separate analyses of the Irish and the Netherlands sample show the more pronounced consequences of the mediating factors in the Irish sample, highlighting the differences in the migratory trajectories of Nigerian parents in Ireland and the Netherlands.