Is ‘empowerment’ a helpful approach to addressing problems faced by marginalised children? This paper argues that empowerment, when envisaged as individual self-transformation and increased capacity to act independently, offers little basis for progressive change. Instead it calls for a relational approach that will transform power relationships at multiple levels.
This paper draws on scholarship on children’s subjecthood and exercise of power and research on children affected by AIDS. Applying the concept of empowerment to the situation of children migrating as a consequence of southern Africa’s AIDS pandemic, this article shows that power relations are at the root of some of the difficulties that marginalised children face. Addressing these difficulties requires processes that recognise that children are embedded in relationships which need to change. The focus must be on transforming power-laden relationships through a relational approach, rather than change in the individual and empowerment from within.
This has broader implications for understanding empowerment in relation to adults, and in differing contexts.
