Over the course of the past several months, I have continued conducting doctoral field research in Peru focused on the cultural, legal, and political dynamics shaping child protection systems and practices of care. This work forms part of my dissertation project examining why Peru continues to rely heavily on institutional forms of child protection despite broader regional shifts toward kinship and community-based care models. My research specifically explores how colonial legacies, racialized understandings of childhood and family, and state practices of bureaucratic legibility shape the lives of children and families interacting with protection systems.
With the support of the UW Center for Human Rights and the fellowships awarded through the Dr. Lisa Sable Brown Fund and the Peter Mack and Jamie Mayerfeld Fellowship, I have been able to deepen both the geographic and relational scope of this work. During this period, I conducted interviews and institutional observations with judges, prosecutors, public defenders, social workers, child protection officials, educators, and community leaders across multiple regions of Peru. I also continued observing family court proceedings related to dependency and domestic violence cases, with particular attention to how children become classified as vulnerable, neglected, abandoned, or in need of state intervention and “protection.”
One of the most significant developments in this stage of the project has been the expansion of my fieldwork into Yapatera, an Afro-Peruvian community in the region of Piura. There, I have spent substantial time building relationships with local schools, caregivers, community members, and institutions connected to the care and protection of children. These interactions have reinforced one of the central observations of my project—namely, that many forms of care and protection already exist within communities but often remain invisible, undervalued, or administratively illegible to state systems that privilege formalized and institutional responses.
In addition to formal interviews and court observation, this phase of the research has emphasized participatory and ethnographic engagement with children themselves. Spending time in educational spaces, community settings, and informal conversations with children has been critical in understanding how young people narrate safety, belonging, care, and authority in ways that often differ from institutional definitions. After spending an impromptu five weeks in Lima wrapping up pending interviews and celebrating my birthday, I returned to one of the local schools and was met with overwhelming warmth and affection from the children in the 5-year-old classroom group at I.E.I. 043. The children leapt from their chairs, ran to embrace me, and eagerly told me how much they had missed me, how much they loved me, and how they remembered the things I had taught them before leaving for Lima. Their sincerity, openness, and trust have offered me an intimate view into their lives that I remain profoundly grateful for. Through everyday conversations about their homes, weekends, families, and routines, children have revealed the textures of community life in ways that no institutional report or quantitative dataset could capture.
These interactions with children across preschool, primary school, and secondary school settings have become one of the most rewarding and meaningful aspects of my fieldwork. The opportunity to listen to children describe their lives in their own words—their joys, frustrations, fears, humor, relationships, and aspirations—has been a true gift. Their accounts consistently complicate simplified institutional narratives about vulnerability, protection, and family life, while reminding me of the importance of approaching this work with humility, attentiveness, and care.
Within one classroom community, I recently learned that a young boy who is legally orphaned currently lives with his maternal grandparents. However, it remains unclear whether this de facto caregiving arrangement has ever been formally legalized through the state system. From what I am learning through interviews with authorities, community members, and local institutions, many caregiving arrangements in the region appear to function outside formal bureaucratic recognition, despite operating as stable and socially legitimate forms of care. If this particular arrangement was ever formalized, it was likely done informally through a local justice of the peace in a process shaped more by immediacy and compassion than by prolonged legal intervention.
Another interaction that has remained with me involved a 5-year-old girl at a different local preschool, I.E.I. 1290, who told me during a playtime conversation that her father had died. The comment emerged while we were playing with blocks and she whined that another child “had a father” while she did not. Almost immediately, one of her classmates interjected to correct her, insisting that her father was not dead but rather working in the coastal city of Paita. Laughing somewhat sheepishly, the young girl then responded, “just kidding, he works in Paita.” During that same interaction, I asked whether her father lived with the family or remained in Paita, and she explained that although he returns home each night around 10:00PM, she rarely sees him during the day; she added that they still eat breakfast together before she leaves for school. Her mother also works outside the home, and the child primarily lives under the care of her grandparents.
From the perspective of many formal child protection systems, prolonged parental absence and reliance on grandparents for day-to-day caregiving could potentially trigger concerns regarding abandonment or neglect. Yet for this child, such arrangements form part of the ordinary structure of family and community life. While she appeared to carry complex emotions surrounding her parents’ absence, she was nevertheless embedded within a network of familial care, affection, and stability that challenges narrow institutional definitions of who is considered to be “raising” a child. Encounters such as these have become increasingly important to my research because they give meaning to statistics and institutional categories that often obscure the lived realities and relational networks sustaining children’s lives.
The fieldwork has also revealed the extraordinary complexity of Peru’s child protection apparatus. What initially appeared to be a more narrowly legal inquiry has evolved into a broader examination of the overlapping institutional, racial, economic, and geographic inequalities that shape access to care and protection. I have encountered substantial regional disparities in resources, judicial infrastructure, institutional capacity, and access to services, particularly in rural and historically marginalized Afro-Peruvian communities. These observations continue to sharpen my analysis of how race, geography, and poverty influence both state intervention and state absence.
Equally important has been the opportunity to strengthen collaborative relationships with Peruvian institutions and organizations. I have continued working closely with CEDET (Centro de Desarrollo Étnico), educational institutions, judicial actors, and state agencies, while also engaging in ongoing conversations with leadership connected to the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations regarding broader questions of child welfare reform and support for caregiving labor. These relationships have been essential not only for research access, but for grounding the project within the lived realities and priorities of the communities and professionals most directly engaged in this work.
This research continues to affirm for me the importance of interdisciplinary and community-engaged scholarship that centers the voices of children and communities often marginalized within policy discussions. I remain deeply grateful for the support that has allowed me to continue this work in the field. The fellowships have directly contributed to travel, regional mobility, institutional coordination, community engagement, and the sustained time necessary to conduct careful ethnographic and legal research across multiple regions of Peru. As the project continues, I look forward to further developing this research into scholarship that contributes both to academic debates and to broader conversations surrounding child protection, Afro-Peruvian and Indigenous epistemologies of care, and culturally grounded forms of care in Peru and across the Americas.