This project explores how, after a century of work based on the notion of childhood as sacred and outside of politics, the world’s pre-eminent child rights organisation wound up cooperating in the indefinite, traumatic detention of children. It proposes that immigration detention facilities and other sites of racialised violence reveal the fragility of the universal norms of childhood associated with progress in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the incarceration of asylum-seeker children by democratic countries expands, this project shines a light on the compromises into which humanitarian organisations are drawn when they seek to offer care in such settings.

Specifically, the project analyses the role of Save the Children Australia (SCA) in Australian-run detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Nauru from 2012-2015. Australia has been an influential pioneer in the global trend towards detention and criminalisation of asylum seekers and refugees. SCA’s offshore operations represent a particularly controversial example of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working as service providers within this system. Yet this moment remains shadowy and poorly researched, obscured by reticence, censorship and judgement. The project focuses on organisational decision-making and ethics, tracing the successive challenges that arose as SCA’s operations expanded and the organisation and its staff came into conflict with both their government employers and their own principles.

The project applies concepts from anthropologies of violence and humanitarianism alongside historical methods to create an empirically grounded account, analysing NGO and government materials, personal testimonies, and public debates. It places these within the long arc of histories of humanitarianism and childhood. It aims to shed light on the possibilities and limitations of mitigating damage when governments inflict harm on individuals in the name of national security. The resulting book will contribute to understandings of a perpetual humanitarian dilemma: where is the line between care and complicity?