‘Killed by charity’ – Towards interdisciplinary children’s rights studies

Killed by charity' is the title of the second album of the avant-garde rock/jazz-band X-Legged Sally and was released in 1993. The phrase also reminds of a tragic event that occurred in the course of food droppings by air over a drought-stricken region in Africa in the early 1990s. According to the band's lead musician, Peter Vermeersch, the title of the album refers to an incident which had lead to the accidental death of some of the people who had received heavy food palettes on their head. They had been, literally, killed by charity. Researchers in the field of childhood studies and children's rights have recurrently uncovered that charity can also 'kill' in a figurative sense. Many articles published in Childhood over the last 20 years have demonstrated that taking unjustified and unfounded measures in order to protect children -in their best interests -has not been without contradictions or even tragedies (A time for celebrations, 1999). Consider, for instance, the infamous example of ingrained child protection policies in Australia during the 20th century that involved the forced removal from their families and placement in institutional or foster care of Aboriginal and mixed-descent children. The history of child protection policy and interventions contains numerous other examples of wellintended charity interventions on children's behalf that have led not to improving but to deteriorating children's conditions. Childhood has also published articles on the harmful consequences of interventions in children's lives in the field of development practice. A recent example includes Susan Levine's (2011) study on how the introduction of child labour legislation in South Africa since the end of apartheid has had the unintended consequence of deepening chronic hunger and poverty among children who formerly participated as seasonal or part-time workers, rather than improving their lives. In another article, Sircar and Dutta (