" CHILDREN OF CALAIS " : PRECARIOUS LIVES BETWEEN FRENCH AND ENGLISH BORDERS
Résumé
At the beginning of November 2016, the jungle camp of Calais has been dismantled and around 1.900 “un-accompanied children” have been obliged to leave it. Most of them have been sent to the “centres d’acceuil et d’orientation” (CAO, reception and guidance center) recently opened in France and some of them have been accepted in England where many expect to go. This situation creates a no-man’s land between national boarders where their identity is put in question. This presentation would like to point out how children’s lives are highly vulnerable in a situation of liminality, a concept introduced by Van Gennep (1908), as the core stage of the “rites de passage”, characterized by the ambiguity or confusion of the identities of people between separation and integration. We would like to think how the liminality of space between boarders of national states, the liminality of their situation between the absence and presence of their family, emphasize the liminality of their age, as “children” and “not children”, and give rise to an unlivable life as human beings.
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