Children’s accounts of violence occupy a paradoxical space in public discourse: they are framed as both essential, unquestionable evidence, and, sometimes at the same time, as unreliable and prone to outside influence. Both framings rely on cultural constructions of the child’s “innocence.” This panel invites papers examining narratives of violence told by children, with a particular interest in experiences of institutional or state violence. How do these narratives complicate familiar tropes of children as voiceless victims in need of saving, or of certain topics as exclusively “adult” or “childish”?  How do child narrators themselves exploit, resist, and play with or into these tropes? How are these children’s narratives received, reframed, and utilized by adult interpolators?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Child social media content creators in Gaza/occupied Palestine

Narratives by or about child soldiers

Stories about and/or by children experiencing incarceration or police violence in the US

Narratives of immigrant or displaced children in the US

Children as perpetrators of violence

250-word abstract + brief bio to marygryctko@gmail.com