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79 Mikael Larsson ChAPtEr 6 in search of Children's Agency Reading Exodus from Sweden When the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was signed in 1989, it was testimony of a rather radical change in point of view.1 No longer was the child regarded as a mere object of adult protection and care. Rather, the child was described as a subject with specific human rights, such as the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion (article 14). Although the convention has been signed by all member states except the United States and Somalia, the gap between the text of the treaty and social reality remains vast. The global community has yet failed to guarantee every child the right of a “standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development” (article 27). Sweden was one of the first member states to sign the convention in June 1990, thereby making the commitment to implement it. This is a country with one of the most generous legislations for parental leave in Europe, where gender equality and “the best interest of the child” are political givens.2 But Sweden has also been criticized by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC 2009), as well as by Human Rights organizations, on a long list of issues, such as legislation, health care, and education.3 In the work of 1. I am indebted to professor Claudia Camp at Texas Christian University for constructive comments on an early version of the article, presented at the Society of Biblical Literature’s International Meeting in Tartu, July 28, 2010. 2. According to the World Economic Forum, Sweden ranked fourth in the world with regard to gender equality in 2010. 3. Of these, most public attention has been brought to the committee’s concern about the occurrence of eating disorders, obesity, and stress levels among children and adolescents 80 Exodus and Deuteronomy implementing the CRC, the significance of “spiritual development” appears especially unclear to Swedish authorities.4 In this context, the Church of Sweden is making a long-term effort (2009–2012) to be relevant for children and youth from birth to eighteen years old.5 The endeavor is specifically motivated by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as well as the Swedish Church order.6 One part of this endeavour is to promote and initiate theological research on children. In this case, the need of the church happened to coincide with the emergence of a dynamic fast-growing international field of enquiry, childhood studies (Kehily 2004, Bunge 2006). And this is where the Hebrew Bible comes in. The request to me was to examine the child in biblical tradition .7 The result was a reading of Genesis and Exodus in search of children’s agency, duties and rights. As what kind of subject does the child feature in the first two books of the Bible? The selection of texts has to do with relevance and pragmatics. It is reasonable to start with texts that are perceived as central in Jewish and Christian interpretative history and texts in which the frequency of children is relatively high. Like many other scholars, I came to childhood studies from gender studies . My earlier work includes a study of a child sacrifice, that of Jephthah’s daughter in the book of Judges.8 Examining rewritings of the narrative in antiquity and modernity, I identified and evaluated the kind of interpretative strategies readers had used to handle the textual violence. Turning to children in a much larger body of texts, I was still somewhat taken aback by the quantity of violence committed against children. Neither did I expect to encounter so much skepticism as I did when I first told people about the (#45), and about the fact that “children in hiding” and undocumented children do not enjoy the right to education (#54–55). The Swedish National Audit Office (SNAO) identified severe deficiencies in the Swedish authorities’ implementation of the CRC, in its most recent report (RiR 2004: 30). 4. This may be explained by a tendency to understand “spiritual development” as something exclusively belonging to the private sphere (Kempe 2010). 5. The Church of Sweden was separated from the state in the year 2000. As of 2009, 71 percent of the population counted as members. The effort to develop theology on behalf of children is shared by several Christian theologians and denominations (Bunge 2009: 92...

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