‘Performative innocence’: Obscuring structural vulnerabilities in child rights governance

Agnes F (2013) Controversy over age of consent. Economic and Political Weekly 48(29): 10–12.

Agnes F (2019) How ‘consent’, ‘agency’ and ‘age’ play out in across the complex terrain of family laws in India. In: Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific. Australian National University, Available at: https://doi.org/10.25911/10RV-TP90

Ahmed S (2017) Living a Feminst Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Alexander MJ (2006) Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Duke University Press.

Balagopalan S (2014) Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India. Palgrave Macmillan.

Balagopalan S (2019) Afterschool and during vacations: on labor and schooling in the postcolony. Children's Geographies 17: 231–245, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2018.1490008

Balagopalan S (2022) Introduction: modernity, schooling and childhood in India: trajectories of exclusion. Children's Geographies 20(6): 747–759, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2022.2073196

Balagopalan S (2023) On the banality of attrition in the lives of chronically marginalized children. Childhood 30(1): 3–8, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682221149570

Balagopalan S (2024) On racialized linear time and temporal ‘othering. Childhood 31(2): 143–151, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/09075682241240839

Bernstein R (2011) Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: NYU Press.

Bonaker A (2018) School Lunch and Social Inclusion in the Context of Urban Poverty. Südasien-Chronik - South Asia Chronicle, 111–137.

Bond Stockton K (2009) The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke University Press.

Burman E (2007) Developments: Child, Image, Nation. Routledge.

CEFMU and Sexuality Working Group (2023) Are existing laws on child, early and forced marriages and unions working for adolescent girls and young women? Position statement and recommendations. https://www.sexualityworkinggroup.org/resource/are-existing-laws-on-child/2C-early-and-forced-marriages-and-unions-working-for-adolescent-girls-and-young-women/3F (Accessed on 12 January 2026).

Cheney K Sinervo A (eds) (2019) Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cooper E Alber E Njoya W (eds) (2025) The Education Alibi: Tracing Education’s Entanglements Across Contemporary Africa. University of Michigan Press.

Faulkner J (2011) The Importance of being Innocent: Why we Worry About Children. Cambridge University Press.

Government of India, Law Commission Report (2023) Age of Consent Under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012. New Delhi: Ministry of Law and Justice (accessed on 10 January 2026).

Holzscheiter A Josefsson J Sandin B (2019) Child rights governance: an introduction. Childhood 26(3): 271–288, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568219854518

Ibrahim H (2021) Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life. NYU Press.

John M (2021) Child Marriage in an International Frame: A Feminist Review from India. Routledge.

Kannan D (2024) Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial India. Cambridge University Press.

Katz C (2010) Accumulation, excess, childhood: towards a counter topography of risk and waste. Documents d’An`alisi Geogr`afica 57(1): 47–60.

Kincaid J (1998) Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Duke University Press.

Kumar A (2019) The ‘untouchable school’: american missionaries, Hindu social reformers and the educational dreams of laboring dalits in colonial North India. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42(5): 823–844.

Kumari R (2022) Constructions and contestations of Indigenous girlhoods in residential schools in central India. Children's Geographies 20: 6–844, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2022.2071601

Llobet V Reynaert D Twum-Danso Imoh A , et al. (eds) (2025) Critical Children’s Rights Studies: A Research Companion. Routledge.

Maithreyi R Kannan D (2022) Modernity, schooling, and childhood in India: trajectories of exclusion. Special issue. Children's Geographies 20(6): 741–746, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2022.2082861

Mander H (2016) A Law Against Children. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/child-trafficking-cases-law-bill-lok-sabha-parliament-5272206/ (Accessed 22 April 2017).

Meiners ER (2016) For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State. U of Minnesota Press.

Murphy M (2017) The Economization of Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

Pande I (2020) Sex, Law and the Politics of Age. Cambridge University Press.

Purkait P Vs the state of West Bengal (2023) criminal appellate jurisdiction CRA DB (14), calcutta high court. from. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/160035977 (Accessed 10 April 2026).

Reynaert D Vandenhole W Twum-Damso IA , et al. (2025) Critical children’s rights studies: an introduction. In: Llobet V (ed), et al. (eds) Critical Children’s Rights Studies: A Research Companion. Routledge.

Sanyal K (2007) Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-colonial Capitalism. Routledge.

Sen S (2005) Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850-1945. Anthem Press.

Shahloub-Kevorkian N (2019) Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding. Cambridge University Press.

Sherman T (2018) Education in early postcolonial India: expansion, experimentation and planned self-help. History of Education 47(4): 504–520, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760x.2017.1413214

Sundar Rajan R (2003) The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India. Duke University Press.

Switzer H Desai K Bent E (eds) (2023) Girls in Global Development: Figurations of Gendered Power. Berghahn Books.

Tambe A (2019) Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexuality Maturity Laws. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Ticktin M (2017) A world without innocence. American Ethnologist 44(4): 577–590, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12558

Vandenhole W Yitaktu T (2025) Child, early, and forced marriage from a critical children’s rights perspective. In: Llobet V (ed), et al. (eds) Critical Children’s Rights Studies: A Research Companion. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 151–166.

Vashist P (2025) Stitching age and labor: the interplay of child laborers, factory schools, and colonial protection In: Bombay Textile Mills, 1880 to 1911. Rutgers University-Graduate School-Camden. (Doctoral Dissertation).

Vashist L (2025) Criminal Law, Feminism and Emotions: Thinking Through the Legal Unconscious. New Delhi: Routledge.

Walters R (2025) Girls, Power and International Development. Bristol University Press.

Yunus (2024) Labour Class Children’s Schooling in Urban India. Routledge.

Zelizer V (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.