Decolonizing children’s agency: Perspectives of children in an Urdu-speaking Bihari camp in Bangladesh

Introduction

‘You can see many children in this camp do not attend school. Most of them need to work. They have a distressful life (told in a condescending tone). You will write about all of these, aren’t you?’ asked Jibon, a 50-year-old man who teaches at one of the primary schools near the camp in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I did my doctoral research. Jibon’s question in our first meeting was rooted in the assumption that a study funded by a university in the Global North could only investigate the children’s vulnerabilities in the Global South. ¹ I tried to explain to him that I am spending time with children to understand their everyday lives. After a pause, Jibon reiterated, ‘you must write about these helpless (oshohay) children in the camp’. He saw children’s lives through the normative lens, which discounts the diversity of children’s experiences in the local context (field note, April 2016).

I begin this paper with this anecdote as it touches upon some of the issues explored in this article, including what remains absent: children’s agency within everyday violence. Drawing on my doctoral research with children (Afroze, 2019), I illustrate how children exercise, navigate, and negotiate agency in an informal settlement (popularly known as a Bihari camp) in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Building on the recent arguments in the field of childhood studies, I use a decolonizing lens to exemplify children’s situated experiences of everyday lives and shed light on how they navigate their agency within the structural and relational constraints. This article engages with the idea of what agency looks like and how it works in practice in a context where the realities of children’s lives are much more complex, diverse, and messy than it often appears in conventional northern-centric discussions, which often privilege individual competencies over collective concerns (James and Prout, 1997).

To this end, first, I will draw on contemporary conversations from southern theories to unpack the notion of decolonization (Connell, 2018; Santos, 2014), followed by recent arguments by scholars in childhood studies on a relational understanding of children’s agency (Abebe, 2019; Prout, 2019; Spyrou, 2018, 2019; Spyrou et al., 2018). I will then describe my research study conducted in an informal settlement in Bangladesh and provide an overview of the methods employed in the study. Then, I will present the narrative accounts of children to argue that a more complex, nuanced, and situated realisation of children’s agency is necessary, which speaks against the conventional, narrow, and ethnocentric understandings about children both in the northern and southern development contexts.

Decolonization and children’s agency

Decolonization is a contested concept widely discussed in various disciplines in social science, including geography, education, development studies, human rights, and, more recently, childhood studies. Understanding decolonization helps to first unpack the notion of ‘Global South’ in the first place, which can be defined as ‘classes and social groups that have suffered, systematically, the oppression and discrimination caused by capitalism and colonialism’ (Santos, 2012: 51). Based on such a view of the ‘Global South’, southern theory (Connell, 2007; Santos, 2012, 2014) dehegemonises established knowledge and theories produced in the affluent Global North by generating knowledge from and about the Global South. It questions the ubiquity of Global Northern knowledge by pointing to the diverse realities and aspirations in the Global South (Connell, 2007). In addition, it argues that the South should not just be used as a field of Northern theoretical applications and thus only to empirically enrich Northern theories, but instead be used as sources of theories. Boaventura de Sousa Santos brings in the notion of ‘epistemologies of the south’ and says:

…the understanding of the world is much broader than the Western understanding of the world [and] the diversity of the world is infinite. […] This immensity of alternatives of life, conviviality and interaction with the world is largely wasted because the theories and concepts developed in the global North and employed in the entire academic world do not identify such alternatives (Santos 2012: 51).

In this line of thought, Sarada Balagopalan (2019: 24) also critiques the implicit divide between the theoretical north and empirical south and calls for a more critical exploration of the relational complexities of children’s everyday lives (see also Kannan et al., 2022).

Children’s agency has been a central concept in Childhood Studies. An emerging body of work argues that, for many years, children’s agency has been uncritically celebrated without providing adequate contextual details of the structural factors and processes that shape and constrain children’s experiences (Abebe, 2019; Esser et al., 2016; Hammersley, 2017; Spyrou, 2019; Wells and Montgomery, 2014). Bluebond-Langner and Korbin (2007) raised some early concerns about the ambiguity of children’s agency by interrogating the ‘nature’, ‘degree’, and ‘impact’ of children’s agency (p. 242). Because of the ambiguity in defining children’s agency, scholars described it as ‘a contested and scrutinised concept’, which needs to be examined through a more critical and contested lens (Tisdall and Punch, 2012: 256). Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi (2013) also recognised that children’s agency is a ‘much used but largely unexamined concept’ (p. 363). Concerning their work with street children in Ghana, Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi (2013) take this conversation forward by conceiving ‘vulnerability as the basis for human agency’ (p. 363). They see vulnerability as integral to the realising agency; for example, when children make decisions and choices (e.g. leaving home and living and working on the streets), these should be seen against a backdrop of their social and contextual constraints and realities which may have triggered their decisions to make those choices. This necessitates a detailed examination of ‘the meanings that children hold and how these constitute the basis of their actions' (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2013: 367). They argue that to develop a holistic understanding of children’s agency, it is essential to dig deep into 'children’s perceptions of their vulnerability, frailty and need’ (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2013: 369). Sally Atkinson-Sheppard’s (2017) research on street children in Bangladesh also finds agency problematic because children join gangs and get involved in organised crimes. She interrogates the usefulness of using an ‘agency lens' in such a context, as this undercuts children’s vulnerabilities within the structural and cultural constraints in which they live (Atkinson-Sheppard, 2017: 425). Thus, she argues for a rigorous consideration of the contexts and conditions in which some children decide to get involved in organised criminal groups. Kari B. Jensen’s (2014) study with child domestic workers in Bangladesh also demonstrates how children’s agency can be constrained within a structure of power where the employers exercise their authority over children and young people who work for them in a highly restrictive context. Elsewhere, Wells and Montgomery (2014) argue for a ‘social recognition’ of children as vulnerable persons – both due to the materiality of their bodies and their social exclusion from full participation – while at the same time recognising the underlying forms of violence to which children are exposed in their everyday lives. They claim that until and unless the ‘role of violence in making the world’ is acknowledged, it will not be possible to implement children’s rights to protection (Wells and Montgomery, 2014: 9; see also Montgomery, 2014).

More recently, Spyros Spyrou and a few other scholars (Spyrou, 2018; Spyrou et al., 2018) see the potential for a relational ontological turn in childhood studies that would enable researchers to ‘decentre’ the child and ‘reimagine’ childhood by moving beyond a fixation on children’s voices and perspectives while exploring children’s everyday experiences within interactional contexts. Tatek Abebe (2019) challenges three predominant assumptions about children’s agency: a) agency is individualised, b) agency is universalised, and c) agency develops as children grow up. He argues that excessive focus on individualism glorifies individuals' capacity to exercise free choice while undercutting the influences of socio-structural constraints on children’s exercise of agency (Abebe, 2019; also Hammersley, 2017; Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2013; Spyrou, 2018). The other assumption that agency is universal is underpinned by a westernised notion of childhood inscribed in the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child, which assumes that all children have the right to participation and their voices need to be heard. Abebe (2019) challenges this notion as it overlooks the broader historical, political, social, and economic contexts and processes that influence and condition the way children exercise their agency (see also Esser et al., 2016; Punch, 2016; Spyrou et al., 2018). The third assumption that children gain agency as they mature suggests attempts to quantify children’s agency, whereas Abebe (2019) argues children’s agency is impossible to assess or quantify normatively. In line with the arguments on the relational perspective of children’s agency, scholars consider that agency needs to be understood as an active, continuous and dynamic process – ‘as continuum and interdependence’ – where children’s agency is intertwined with social relationships and interactions within social contexts (Abebe, 2019; Esser et al., 2016; Punch, 2016). Against the backdrop of agency interconnections, Punch (2016) explores power from a relational perspective, viewing the lives of children and adults as connected to ‘negotiated interdependence’ across social relations and spaces. Scholars further argue for more critical explorations of the complex ways power circulates everyday spaces and places where children navigate their agency about the ‘power of place and power in place’ [italics in original] (Punch et al., 2007: 210). They illustrate, ‘[w]hilst power can be oppressive and constraining, it can also be enabling, whereby young people manage to exercise power, on their own and with other young people, in their daily lives to balance adult demands with their own needs and desires’ (Punch et al., 2007: 210).

The critical reviews of the work on children’s agency shed light on the epistemic challenge they present to the scholars of childhood studies by accentuating the need to be more nuanced in bringing out children’s voices on the ground. To understand how children negotiate, compromise, and navigate agency within the structural constraints, it is essential to bring their world views on their own terms instead of mediating through the theories and knowledge produced in the North. Therefore, using a decolonizing methodology would be imperative to unearth how structural power relations contributed to, if not created, the conditions of inequalities and violence in children’s everyday lives. Having reviewed the discussions on a relational understanding of children’s agency, I present the research context and methods before illustrating children’s accounts.

Research and its context

The findings presented in this paper are part of my doctoral study, which explored children’s everyday lives in the socio-spatial context of an informal settlement in Dhaka, generally known as a Bihari camp. Examining the everyday lives of children and adults in the camp, the study illuminated how the concept of everyday violence plays out in children’s lives and how children negotiate their agency in responding to everyday violence. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in that resource-poor neighbourhood from April to December 2016.

The people living in the camp have migrated from Bihar and a few other Muslim majority states in India. During the regional division of the subcontinent and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, many displaced Bihari (regional identity of those who claim to belong to the region of Bihar) moved to present-day Bangladesh (the then East Pakistan). During the post-partition period, many Urdu-speaking Biharis, primarily due to their religious and linguistic associations, sympathised more with the elites of West Pakistan (present-day Pakistan). Around the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, many Biharis took shelter in temporary camps, which remain home to many. Bihari people living in the camps have had limited access to education. They have always been discriminated against securing employment, resulting in a vicious cycle of poverty for generations. They have primarily engaged in informal jobs, working as unregistered workers, casual or temporary wage labourers, traders, and in home-based work related to weaving and karchupi (traditional hand embroidery popular in South Asia). For many years the Bihari community in Bangladesh experienced structural inequalities and marginalisation as they did not have any right to citizenship until 2008 (Redclift, 2013). And yet, they continue to live in informal settlements.

The camp I researched has around 4500 residents (Redclift, 2013). Most households have a space of 100 square feet as their homes, where 5–7 members stay together on average. The camps’ houses are mostly made of bricks and concrete but have roofs of corrugated iron sheets. There is one government-run primary school within the broader camp catchment area, a small primary school, and an early childhood development centre run by two separate non-governmental organisation (NGOs). While primary education is free for all children, parents must pay for their education at the higher secondary schools in the broader suburb. Most families cannot afford their children’s education at the secondary level or drop out earlier than completing their national level exams of grade 10. Children start work in the garment industry as early as 7–8 years of age, usually at home-based. Girls have limited opportunities for work outside the camp. However, boys often work in small workshops on automobiles, electronics, metal works, and bus helpers, which are considered exploitative and hazardous.

Methods

My research approach in this study resonates with the views of the decolonizing methodology, which aims to create a space for ‘understanding and knowing the world differently’ and sensitively address the structural power inequality between the researcher and the participants (Smith, 2021: xiii). Using a decolonized approach allows researchers to ‘reimagine knowledge production, representation, [and] power relations’ in ways that challenge how knowledge is produced (Cheney, 2018: 100). The realities of the lives of children from Urdu-speaking Bihari camps in Bangladesh have mostly remained unresearched and unnoticed in the global scholarship. As a PhD student at a university in the global North, researching a minority community within my home country’s socio-political, cultural, and economic fabric necessitated more reflexivity in my positionality to understand the power dynamics in knowledge production. Being a Bangladeshi, I was not external to the research community; however, I knew that I could not be just one of them because of the apparent political, ethnic, and linguistic differences. Bearing that I represent the dominant majority of Bangali, I was mindful of how the children and adults in the Bihari camp would identify with my social position and its apparent trappings of power. I was aware the community has a distinctive and complex historical, political, and cultural background. This is infused with their perceived anti-nationalist sentiments during the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971.

In my previous role as a child protection practitioner, I had professional contact with an NGO, which worked to support children’s rights in Bangladesh with the support of international donors and funding agencies. My initial contact with the children was supported by this NGO, which has had the experience of working in this camp for more than 5 years. My initial discussion with the gatekeeper NGO before the fieldwork and my initial reading of the literature on the Bihari community in Bangladesh prepared me to plan enough time for building rapport with the participants before starting data collection. Eventually, a more sensitive approach was taken to address the power issues between the researcher and the researched. Instead of entering the research site as an all-knowing researcher, using a decolonizing method facilitated me to understand the lives of children by participating with them in their everyday lives. Scholars argue that there are multiple ways of understanding the realities of indigenous lives. The researchers need to be ‘ethical and respectful’ and ‘reflexive and critical’ about their research practices (Smith, 2021: 158). Using a reflexive and critical approach to research gave me the confidence to decentre the power and be more open and flexible about what children and adults were saying instead of putting their ideas into my pre-defined theoretical categories.

Drawing on the ample literature available on the social and cultural anthropology of childhood, I, too, conducted an ethnography, mainly focused on the themes of children’s everyday lives, children’s agency, and everyday violence (Abebe, 2009; Beazley et al., 2009; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007; Montgomery, 2009; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004). Through my ethnography, I established a relationship of trust with the participants and negotiated relationships of power between the researcher – adult – and researched – children. During that 9-month fieldwork, I lived outside the camp but travelled at least 4 days a week for around 8 hours. The ethnographic fieldwork involved participant observations with children and adults at their homes, workplaces, communal open spaces, play areas, and drop-in-centres of a NGO which helped me get a more profound and nuanced understanding of the children’s lives. The more extensive study also included 46 conversational interviews, 13 group interviews, and 11 group discussions with 132 participants. Among them, 78 were children between 5 to 18 years old (43 female and 35 male), and 54 were above 18 years old (31 female and 23 male). In this paper, I primarily draw on how exchanges with children indicate how they negotiate relational power and inequalities and navigate their agency in the context of everyday violence.

Ethics in this research has been rooted within the whole research process. This study went through the ethical approval process of the university ethics committee, where I did my doctoral study. Ethics has been embedded in this study to ensure that the power relationship between the researcher and the researched is carefully addressed (Beazley et al., 2009). In my research, I was aware of my positionality. I was reflexive about my position of power to critically engage in the research process, explore how knowledge is produced in the field, and examine how social relations and power exist between and within the research community and between the researcher and the researched.

Children’s varied responses to adults’ violence

Children’s everyday life experiences are embedded in the unequal relationships of power between children and adults, where children’s experiences are often mediated by their agency negotiations (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004; Wells and Montgomery, 2014). My research findings illustrate that violence takes many forms in the camp, but one of the most visible and overt is that done in the name of discipline and socialisation. Physical violence is a broad term used by academics and practitioners to include physical and corporal punishments, humiliation, and violent forms of discipline of children (Parkes, 2015; Pells et al., 2018). However, as I will discuss, the people in the camp do not necessarily consider hitting or beating children as abuse or violence; instead, they use this to discipline children. Academics and practitioners often categorise swearing, bad words, and shouting as emotional/psychological abuse (Smith and Pollak, 2021; UNICEF, 2018). However, they are rarely discussed as abuse by my research participants though their absence or presence was an important issue for them and a marker of good/rotten children and good/rotten parenting (Afroze, 2022).

Adult-child relationships in Bangladesh are embedded in hierarchical relationships of power. Adults validate their exercise of power over children, while children also largely acquiesce and even support adults’ authority (Kabeer and Mahmud, 2009). The role of everyday violence in the shape of discipline in the camp was discussed explicitly by two of my informants Bablu, male, 10 years, and Shurjo, male, 7 years, who shed light on the cultural norms regarding social relationships between older and younger people:

Bablu: ‘Yes, they [my parents] hit me. Why won’t they [he says with stress in his tone]? They have the odhikar (right) to hit our bodies. As grown-ups, they surely can beat us.

Bablu’s exercise of authority shows how violence becomes legitimised and how older children use violence towards younger ones to display their increased symbolic power, which they have accrued with age. This is also something that Spyrou (2018) has discussed in his work with Greek Cypriot children as an example of how children’s exercise of agency can be problematic when it is used to reproduce structural inequalities (p. 128). This also illustrates that violence exists in the community. However, it is understood differently when taken out of context and equated with universal rights norms globally.

While children may have strong views about conforming to the relationship of power, this does not mean that they passively accept unequal power exercises. While they spoke in some instances about their belief in the need to conform and comply with all forms of adult authority, they also had techniques and strategies to undermine it. A conversation between 10-year-old Pia, female, and her friend, 12-year-old Champa, female, illustrates their strategy to reduce the impacts of physical punishments.

Pia: When the teacher asked me to read, I couldn’t. Then they would almost smash my hands, smacking… It would hurt… I never told my mum [laughs]. If I had told mum, then she would scold me again. She would say, [mimicking her mum’s angry expression] ‘you don’t study; you deserve a few smacks…

Though the parents more commonly perpetrate emotional abuse towards girl children, physical violence against boys is more common than against girls. While on the other hand, it was apparent among the participants’ narratives that teachers often hit both girls and boys in the schools. In contrast to absolute conformity to adults’ authorities, children repeatedly demonstrated the varied techniques they adapt to negotiate their experiences of violence. Children’s statements show, as also projected in Rima’s expressions below, how they negotiate their positions with adults to stop violent practices in specific family cultural dynamics of authority, discipline, and violence.

Children’s economic power and contribution to the family are often the stimuli to negotiate and create strategies to resist violence, however only in contexts outside of the family dynamic. In a group discussion, Rima, 12 years, shares that she stopped going to the karchupi (hand embroidery) workshop as the mohajon (the factory owner) smacked her if she did not do her work well. Rima told her mother and her older sister about the punishments and expressed her unwillingness to go to work anymore. During our discussion, Rima was negotiating with her family her decision to discontinue work:

What would they [family members] do if I didn’t go to the factory? Would they be able to force me and drag me to the factory? Even if they drag me, and I do not work well, would the mohajon continue to employ me? What would you do if your back was dashed against the wall? (deyal e pith theke gese) You must turn around. There is no other way around it.

Hitting, smacking, and shouting are normalised yet are seen as justifiable reasons for refusing to go to work. Children’s agency is curbed in a restricted context (Jensen 2014). Nevertheless, Rima could stand firm on her position because of the power of her economic influence and her potential to bring in income in the future. Her mother and older sister did not want to upset her and force her to work in this violent context, as her future contribution to the family income was a significant support to them. They had to accept her negotiated agency. The narratives presented here demonstrate that while children normalise violence from family and teachers, they refuse to accept violence from employers. Children express their agency against violence in specific contexts and are not universally understood in north centric literature. Children’s ethnographic accounts unveil the caveats and contingencies of children’s lives interwoven to their negotiation of power within the generational power structures and cultural practices of everyday lives. Children’s narratives draw out the contested power dynamics related to gender and generation, which can unsettle power hierarchies within families as, for example, it was illustrated in the narratives of Rima.

Gender and unequal relationships of power

Social and cultural norms related to unequal power relations across gender and household dynamics trigger visible and invisible forms of violence in the everyday lives of girls and boys in the camp (Pells et al., 2018). Several children expressed their experiences with gendered inequalities and violence about child marriage – a practice like physical punishment– rooted in the concept of maan-shomman (respectability). Parents in this study also articulated that they deem early marriage as one of the most feasible means to ensure their daughter’s safety and protection which could uphold the familial and communal construct of respectability. Among the families who did marry off their daughters before the age of 18 said that their daughters were in relationships, and they feared that if they did not get them married, they might run away or get married on their own, which would bring more disgrace to them their families.

Ratri, 16, learned from the experiences of her eldest sister, who was married at 13, that early marriage should not be seen as the remedy for protection from risks and securing her future. Ratri said:

Diba (eldest sister) made a mistake. Now we don’t want to have the same fate as her. My younger sister and I don’t want to repeat our eldest sister’s mistake. Even Diba warned us, ‘never do anything like this. Now, this caught my attention! If my sister says this, she indeed speaks from her life experiences. She is talking about her grief, isn’t she? When someone experiences grief, only then can she explain this to others. She experienced pains, and then she alerted us to that. When someone sees thorns on the way, they can only make others aware not to take the same thorny path. This is what I learned from my sister. Am I not correct in my thinking? I will not take that road [of love, affairs, and marriage]. (Ratri, 16, female, group interview)

Ratri chose to conform to her parental authority by marrying the person of her parent’s choice, which will secure social respectability. There has been a growing consensus among the camp residents (both adults and children) that child marriage is ‘bad’ and ‘not right’. Many participants referred to NGO interventions and advocacy initiatives, which helped them become more informed about the legal age of marriage and the consequences of child marriage. The evolving realisation that ‘child marriage is not something good’ was internalised, which became apparent in my conversations with some children. Relating to these conversations, some girls emphasised the importance of being self-dependant and securing an identity of their own before getting married. Urmi, 18, expressed her desire ‘to do something and become someone in her life. She believes that if she develops her capabilities, only then she would be able to become independent and would not require her to depend on her future husband. Urmi wanted to get a job so that she could support her parents. Yet, given the limited opportunities due to her academic ‘failure’, Urmi was aware that her aspirations for having ‘an identity of her own’ are constantly challenged and confronted by social realities.

Rodela, 17, expressed her fear that her mother would marry her off, for which she was unprepared. Rodela was ambivalent about how she would negotiate with her mother about the marriage as she claimed her mother was ‘emotionally blackmailing’ her by saying, ‘if I don’t arrange for your marriage now, then what will happen to you if I die soon? Rodela articulated that young women must have some academic accomplishments to work as ‘backup capital’ if their marriages face difficulties. Rodela said: ‘what if he [would-be husband] gets me out of the house? What would I do then? Would I beg in the street? If I had an education, I would be able to get a job’. Even though Rodela’s feelings about education are largely pragmatic, she gives an insight into the changing social norms where young women have started raising their voices for independence. Education becomes a protection strategy for many young women who, unlike their parents, do not have an uncritical reliance and confidence in marriage. The observation and narrations of Urmi, Rodela, and Nishi suggest that having an academic certificate provides symbolic power to a married woman who can help her negotiate authority in marital relationships. Thus, they place importance on gaining certificates so that ‘if something wrong happens’ [such as divorce, domestic violence], they would be able to get a job and support themselves.

Life of Nishi, 16, presents a good illustration of children’s responses to child marriage. Nishi told me that when she was around 15, her parents arranged her wedding with one of her distant relatives. Knowing that her parents were setting for her marriage, Nishi realised that she was at ‘big risk [bipod]’. As a member of one of the community groups for girls supported by a local NGO, Nishi talked to the NGO social worker. With her support, she spoke to her parents but failed to convince them to bring a change in their decision regarding her marriage. Nishi then sought the help of the police and informed them about her parents’ plan for her wedding. A police officer visited their house and ‘gently threatened’ (Nishi’s words) her parents, who eventually postponed Nishi’s marriage until she was 18. However, there were also other factors at play. Rozina, Nishi’s mother, later told me that Nishi was having an affair, which drove them to decide to arrange for her marriage (which Nishi never revealed to me). To Rozina and her husband, having a wedding was a quick fix and the only way to protect their family’s maan-shomman (respectability). Nishi explained how she rationalised her arguments with her parents.

I told my parents, ‘If I get married without considering my age, the loss would be all mine. You prefer to arrange my marriage soon to take the burden [of a daughter] away from your head. And then I would have to carry the burden [of marriage] on my own’… I want to finish my studies now. If I finish my studies and something terrible happens [she referred to divorce], I will be able to do some job.

Urmi, Rodela, and Nishi all wanted to grow up some more – both in education and age – before making any decisions about marriage. Within the constraints of adult power, they considered education an essential protective measure in marriage. Nishi thinks that education can give a woman both authority and agency in making decisions about her own life if anything terrible happens in the marriage. In the context of poverty and vulnerability, Nishi’s decision to delay her marriage demonstrates her ability to exercise agency over parental decision-making at a critical juncture of her life. Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi (2013) argued in their study that children’s ‘meaningful’ agency needs much critical exploration with a more nuanced understanding of how the agency is shaped and constructed by children’s vulnerability (p. 365).

Naila, 15, claimed as she was married by her own choice, she felt obliged to bear the abuses of her mother-in-law. During our conversation, Naila mentioned several times that ‘what else to do, I married by my own choice’ – which indicated passive compliance to her vulnerability. Naila knew that she did not have any other way to escape the consequences of her marriage, as she married by her own choice. Thus, even though she sounded passive, as mentioned earlier, surrendering to her perceived irreversible reality, she came back to her resilient self a moment later and said the following:

They [parents] would never realise one thing. The marriage was by my own choice, but so what? If my parents had decided, wouldn’t ever have any complications happened? I indeed wanted to get married. But it is my parents who organise everything. It is not that I ran away from home or did something else [she referred to premarital sexual relationship] … Now I just want that no one can ever tell my husband that he has brought a bou (wife) at home who is not a decent one. I got married at a young age, but I use my brain. Yeah, I got married early. But now, what else to do? It doesn’t matter how much I broom my kismaat (luck); I can't alter my fate. That’s why I want that nobody gets the chance to say anything to him or me… I want people to say that ‘yeah, they married at a young age, but they are doing well and living happily’… I want people to say that I use my sense – so that no one ever shames me for being young.

Naila’s narrative reiterates that an individual’s ability to negotiate their agency is interconnected to the complex social world in which they exist. To what extent children can exercise their agency to subvert hegemonic social norms and practices like child marriage to harness their desire and mobilise their freedom remains critical. However, the accounts of Urmi, Rodela, Nishi, or Naila indicate the inter-generational and gendered complexities entangled with the realisation of their agency that cannot be brushed away with the possible monolithic rigour of agentification. To understand the local processes more inductively, the findings in this paper do not provide any straightforward explanation as to whether child marriages are the cause or a symptom of the ubiquity of violence in the community. It instead presents child marriage as a practice complexly and firmly ingrained in the local socio-cultural and economic structure, intensifying the vulnerability of children. Despite their growing realisation of the negative consequences of child marriage, it continues to solidify the exclusion and marginalisation of early married girls and their families.

Overall, the findings in this article suggest that the reality of children’s experiences of the everyday agency is complex: that children must go through constant negotiations and confrontations with gendered and generational practices in their daily lives while, at the same time, they constantly negotiate their agency to challenge and respond to the everyday power dynamics in the community as it was illustrated in the narratives of either Bablu and Shurjo, or Naila and Rodela. The findings, cohering to the growing articulations among many scholars (Abebe, 2019; Prout, 2019; Spyrou et al., 2018), interrogate the commonly sanctioned glorification and romanticisation of the notion of children’s agency, showing the local and contextual tenability and determinants of the construct.

Conclusion

Taking a relational standpoint and employing a decolonial lens, this paper explores children’s everyday lives in a camp in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to interrogate the perceived ubiquity of some of the normative assumptions on children’s agency. In this paper, the ethnographic accounts of children are threaded through their lives’ broader historical, cultural, social, and spatial fabric. In unpacking this, I highlight the contextual and relational processes that shape children’s agency, which is more ambiguous and complex than are initially apparent. This demonstrates that children’s agency is intertwined with gendered and generational power relationships, manifested in the spaces and places children operate in their everyday lives. This has generated valuable insights into the realities of the lives of children and adults, where they constantly negotiate and contest their relationships within the context of mundane precariousness.

Using a decolonizing lens in this research challenged my practitioner self, who, inspired by donor-funded research, a framed agency from a more individualised perspective. This research, as it unfolded, shows that children’s relationships with everyday precarity and agency are more complex and nuanced than what I could capture earlier in my capacity as a child protection practitioner, which was pre-dominantly nourished by a positivistic, interventionist, and transformational frame of mind. As presented in the anecdote at the outset of this paper, there is general anticipation that a study funded by an institution at the Global North would be interested in depicting children as helpless and vulnerable individuals. Embracing a more sensitive and locally situated methodology, refraining from employing any pre-defined, Global North-based references in terms of agency or empowerment, I started to appreciate children’s lives from a more bottom-up approach. I gradually realised children were not necessarily celebrating how they overcame the odds; instead, they articulated how they constantly negotiated and constructed their agency during difficult circumstances. As I delved deeper into the everyday realities and possibilities of children and their families, the temptation to see them as ‘survivors’ gave way to understanding how they exercise their agency, or more importantly, how they compromise and negotiate their agency in their routine lives: lives which were led under circumstances of everyday violence. Moreover, how children navigate their relationship of power is also closely interwoven into the broader fabric of their routine lives. The findings thus echo Southern theoretical perspectives (Connell, 2007; Santos, 2012) to understand Southern reality from a locally tenable standpoint, ensuring tolerance for ambiguity and contextual deconstruction of ‘agency’ and ‘empowerment’. The paper also forwards the value of locally sensitive ethnographic methodology as presented in the work of Smith (2021), which can capture this ambiguity through dialogic interactions to contribute significantly to Southern epistemology. This calls for international development agencies to take a more assertive role as brokers between communities and funding agencies to have a two-way flow of conversations and dialogue. There should be a genuine interest in listening to what children in the local context say rather than what the funding bodies want to hear. Attempts to see positive changes in children’s lives often limit child protection practitioners’ ability to be fully engaged with and holistically informed about the historical, political, economic, and socio-cultural contexts that perpetuate violence in diverse contexts. Thus, every so often, interventions do not problematise the nuances of children’s agency and do not leave room to be critical about the underlying causes of violence. In resonance with the work of Montgomery (2014), this paper also implies not to be too carried away with children’s ability to exercise their agency. Instead, it evokes the importance of unearthing the structural complexities in which children live and digging deeper into why led children are kept with minimal choices in the context of everyday violence.

Using a decolonizing lens – revisiting the structure of social and economic inequality – in understanding child agency helped me deconstruct normative assumptions on children’s capacities in influencing their own lives and created space to appreciate the complexities of children’s diverse experiences within the relational context. Therefore, research on childhood and children’s lives may benefit from being more open and curious about learning from their experiences rooted in their broader socio-structural experiences and recognising the multifaceted realities of their lives. While this should not be understood as children’s lives being perpetually engulfed by structurally determinism, contextually stripped accentuation on children’s agency, as argued in this study, is not necessarily the remedy for the challenges faced in the context of everyday violence. However, everyday violence and agency complement each other conceptually and call for critical exploration. To contribute to the critical and decolonizing scholarship of childhood studies, researchers need to go beyond the often-universalised conceptualisation of children’s agency and ensure discussions on children’s agency are engrained in the realities of experiences on the ground, which has the potential to unearth a deeper and more nuanced understanding of children’s agency in a diverse world context.