Thinking across generations: child protection as protection of the generational meaning of existence. A sociological reflection on safeguarding
Isabella Cordisco
The paper proposes a sociological reflection on child protection within a generational and relational context in which childhood itself is involved. Drawing on generational sociology and the new sociology of childhood, and following the relational turn in the social sciences, we propose a conceptualization of child protection as the protection of generational relations in a familiar and public context. The discussion seems particularly useful to contextualize the relevant and recent scientific, political and social discussion on child protection within a relational paradigmatic framework that no longer considers childhood and minors in an isolated and self-referential way, as most medical and individualistic models of protection do, nor in an exclusively organizational and structural way, as cultural and social models of childhood do. In this way, we want to overcome the fallacies of dichotomous and binary thinking and propose a realistic and critical reading of childhood, in order to identify a «generational culture» that thinks, acts and renews itself in the complex intertwining of generations.
Keywords
Child protection, safeguarding, generational relations, interweaving of generations.