Children Displaced Across Borders Conference

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This weekend (18 – 19 November) the Swansea University’s Centre for Migration Policy Research, the Wales Observatory on Human Rights of Children and Young People, along with partners at University of Houston, are hosting a conference which focuses on Children Displaced Across Borders.

Children may be displaced across borders in many ways and for many reasons, including but not limited to poverty, violence or political upheaval, transit for commercial exploitation, and human trafficking. 

Definitions of and discourses on children, rights, migrants, and borders are contested and blurred within the context of twenty-first century forced migration.  Though their experiences differ depending on time and place, children displaced across borders are likely to encounter a range of human rights violations.  State responses to such violations are fragmented and inadequate in ways that suggest unintended consequences of current law, gaps between policy and implementation in practice and/or tensions between human rights and other political or economic imperatives. 

Utilizing a bi-regional approach, this conference is designed to allow comparative analyses of the current condition of displaced children and their respective rights within the European Union and Northern Triangle-Mexico-United States geographic regions. In doing so, this conference aims to facilitate dialogue not only on complex understandings and representations of displaced children, but to propose next steps for research, policy, and practice-driven interventions and solutions.