Voices from the Camps: Vietnamese Children Seeking Asylum

8. Interventions

c h a p t e r e i g h t Interventions To Intervene or Not? Cultural and Moral Dilemmas We have called attention to the shortcomings of individuals and agencies entrusted with the care of unaccompanied minors. The children were shortchanged ; that is why we intervened to assist them. Were we justified? Nancy Scheper-Hughes has noted that anthropologists are changing their attitudes towards intervention. Earlier, many pushed an ethically relativist view of child rearing practices in different societies, defending them as adaptive, and thus not to be tampered with. Children were said to be resilient to practices ranging from harsh initiation rites to child swapping to multiple mothering. What might be considered “abuse” in one society might be the acceptable norm for another and make sense in the larger ecological, social, and cultural context in which those practices were embedded. Recently, anthropologists have challenged the appropriateness of relativism; they have questioned “the ‘goodness’ and ‘just rightness’ of such normative practices for the child, although their adaptiveness for the parents and other adults remains undisputed.”1 But this does not automatically justify intervention when children are perceived as being “at risk.” Scheper-Hughes cautions that what is considered harmful , what causes harm, and the wider context in which harm occurs remain controversial.2 “The reluctance to prescribe, along with a tendency to criticize well-intentioned but misguided interventions, is not born of the scholar’s natural disinclination to action, but rather from an informed understanding of the complexities of social life and of the sociogenic side-effects of a sometimes • 164 • self-serving altruism.”3 In other words, intervention in the face of perceived abuse or neglect is neither self-evident nor a universal imperative. To be justified, it requires a thorough understanding of the wider ecological, economic, and social setting in which the intervention occurs. It also requires a consideration of the ethical and moral implications of such action, an awareness of whether or not such interventions mesh with the thinking and practices of the people whom interventionists purport to help, and, finally, consideration of the cultural and social assumptions interventionists bring with them, as well as the impact that their values and style of operation have on those who are influenced by their actions. For Scheper-Hughes, one of the “greatest lies and self-deceptions” in examining the abuse and neglect of children worldwide is “the denial of collective social responsibility for the welfare of parents and their children.” She argues that infanticide, selective neglect, and child battering cannot simply be explained away as a problem of “demented” or defective parents. These issues also involve institutional and social matters. Specifically, she points to “structural inequalities in the world economic order. . . . The greatest threat to child survival in the world today is the poverty of Third World mothers.”4 The primary cause of the neglect of children, says Scheper-Hughes, is poverty, whether in America or elsewhere.5 The warnings of Scheper-Hughes apply to the controversies surrounding unaccompanied minors. Vietnamese parents and relatives removed sons and daughters from their families and sent them on perilous journeys into Cambodia or across the South China Sea. These desperate acts, which contradicted normative childcare practices in Vietnam, resulted in the deaths and grievous suffering of thousands of children. But exposing children to these risks reflected not a lack of concern about their fate, but such excessive conditions of hunger, poverty, and political oppression that parents saw no alternative but to send their children away. The selective neglect of repatriated children by their relatives also reflects conditions of poverty, not indifference or moral decay. So, too, the neglect of children in refugee camps is not so much the fault of their immediate caretakers in the camps. Rather, it is the collective social responsibility of those who, for political reasons, set up and maintained the camps with insu‹cient resources to protect these children and allowed them to remain there for years on end. These wider political and economic considerations played an important role in our decision to intervene on behalf of these children, and the ways in which we chose to do so. I N T E R V E N T I O N S • 165 Assisting Unaccompanied Minors in Detention Camps Prior to the CPA, the problems of the unaccompanied minors were not so acute, since they were resettled, usually within a few months of arriving in a camp. After the CPA...