Rights Activism, Judicial Practices, and Interpretative Codes: Children in Family Justice (Argentina, 1990–2015)

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the process through which the "child's right to be heard" in Argentina was turned into a powerful operator to reprioritise the criticism to the justice system and to disseminate other sensitivities regarding childhood. To this end, on one hand, I explore the linkages between the advance of the children's rights language with the neoliberalisation processes in the region, focusing on the "resemantisation" of rights in the local context. On the other hand, I describe the practical uses and specific meanings that judicial agents of family courts attach to the child's right to be heard. By using an ethnographic corpus made up of interviews and observations, I examine the interpretative keys used to render intelligible what children say in the judicial sphere, and I look into the conceptualisations about childhood underlying those keys.