Dr Hedi Viterbo
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Law, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Email: hedi.viterbo@qmul.ac.uk
Profile
Dr Hedi Viterbo is the founding director of the Childhood, Law & Policy Network and a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Law at Queen Mary University of London. His research takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on sources from a broad range of times and places, to challenge conventional thinking about childhood, law, human rights, and state violence.
A central focus of his work is the role of legal and human rights discourses and practices in shaping childhood across various contexts. Several of his publications reveal how legal principles of child rights, often assumed to be protective, can actually harm marginalized and oppressed groups - including people in trouble with the law, refugees, colonized peoples, and activists - of all ages.
Research
Publications
Relevant publications:
- 'No Refuge from Childhood: How Child Protection Harms Refugees' (2024) 35:3 European Journal of International Law 647–678 (with Yulia Ioffe).
- 'Critical Childhood Studies Meets Critical Legal Scholarship' (2023) in Sarada Balagopalan, John Wall, and Karen Wells (eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies (Bloomsbury) 349–364.
- 'Just for Kids? How the Youth Decarceration Discourse Endorses Adult Incarceration' (2022) Criminology & Criminal Justice.
- Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
- 'The Pitfalls of Separating Youth in Prison: A Critique of Age-Segregated Incarceration' (2021) in Alexandra Cox and Laura S. Abrams (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Youth Imprisonment (Palgrave Macmillan) 539-562.
- ‘Rights as a Divide-and-Rule Mechanism: Lessons from the Case of Palestinians in Israeli Custody’ (2018) 43:3 Law & Social Inquiry 764-795.
- ‘Ties of Separation: Analogy and Generational Segregation in North America, Australia, and Israel/Palestine’ (2017) 42:2 Brooklyn Journal of International Law 686-749.
- ‘The Age of Conflict: Rethinking Childhood, Law, and Age through the Israeli-Palestinian Case’ (2012) in Michael Freeman (ed.), Current Legal Issues Vol. 14: Law and Childhood Studies (Oxford University Press) 133-155.