Childhood and the cultural constitution of vulnerable bodies

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the cultural meanings of vulnerability in childhood. The implicit assumption of both research into and everyday practice around childhood is that children are vulnerable, and that during illness the child is particularly vulnerable and in need of adult care and therapy. Adults are therefore viewed as being in charge of, and having responsibility for, the child, and the child is positioned as the dependent and passive object. Whilst not wishing to make a general challenge to the idea that children may be vulnerable, or to the biological dimension of it, in this chapter I suggest that the construction of children as essentially vulnerable tends to exclude consideration of the cultural and social context in which vulnerability is constituted and to render children’s own understandings of themselves and their bodily experiences as unimportant. I will suggest that a child’s vulnerability is in part associated with the way in which people are perceived by themselves and by others. Understood in this way vulnerability is seen as a constructed status, in this instance embedded in cultural understandings of the child as a social person, of the child’s body and conceptions of health and illness in childhood. I investigate perceptions of the vulnerability of children both by examining cultural perspectives on the child’s body and by using fieldwork material gathered during an ethnographic study of childhood illness conducted among 6-13-year-old Danish school children in a district of Copenhagen.