Children’s accounts of violence occupy a paradoxical space in public discourse: they are framed as both essential, unquestionable evidence, and, sometimes at the same time, as unreliable and prone to outside influence. Both framings rely on cultural constructions of the child’s “innocence” (Kincaid 1998, Bernstein 2011, Ticktin 2025). Drawing on Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” (1988) and Said’s “Permission to Narrate” (1984), this panel asks when, how, and under what constraints children are permitted to narrate their experiences of violence, and under what conditions these narratives become legible to adult audiences.

The papers in this panel cover a wide historical and geographical range: from 18^th century colonial Connecticut, to 20^th century Iraqi Kurdistan, to contemporary Gaza. They are also methodologically diverse, engaging archival, literary, and new media texts. What unites them is their attention to the lived experiences of children under occupation and state violence. All three papers challenge the liberal notion of childhood as a privileged time of innocence and play, and show child narrators who are, at best, ambivalent about that ideal. Each paper also shows the difficulty of accessing children’s accounts without mediation. In these texts, children’s narratives are filtered through adult interpolators of varying sympathy: the judge and jury, the potential donor on social media, the adult self.

The panel consists of three eighteen-minute papers, leaving ample time for discussion.

In the first paper, “The Afterlives of an Unthinkable Child: (Re)reading Hannah Occuish at the Edges of the Archive,” Josiah Carolina Velázquez examines the case of Hannah Occuish, an orphan child of African and Pequot descent, who was convicted of murder and executed in 1786 Connecticut. At twelve, Hannah remains the youngest person sentenced to death in the United States. Hannah’s life and bodymind serve as sites to interrogate the existing memory of Black Native people across the “New World,” and reveal the ways Blackness and indigeneity, ability, gender, and age are understood in settler colonial logics. Velázquez shows how Black Natives are unchilded (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2019), arguing that the discourse that led to Hannah's execution has led to the erasure of Indigenous people, and of Black Natives more specifically, from dominant historical narratives. Searching the edges of the archive, Velázquez attempts to understand Hannah’s subjectivity in ways that give shape to the subjectivity of Afro-Natives in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Next, in “‘Not Yet Corrupted by Politics:’ Childhood, Human Rights, and Dissensual Bildung in My Father’s Rifle,” Rojda Arslan examines Hiner Saleem’s My Father’s Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan (2004), a fictionalized account of Saleem’s childhood in Iraqi Kurdistan during the Ba’athist era. Drawing on Joseph Slaughter’s argument that the Bildungsroman underwrites the human person of human rights discourse, Arslan reads Saleem’s novella as what Slaughter calls a “dissensual” Bildungsroman, which inhabits the genre’s conventions only to refuse its liberal humanist assumptions. The coming-of-age the novella tracks is not one of liberal self-realization but of progressive disillusionment with liberation and Western humanitarian promise. Arslan argues that the text undercuts the sentimental identification that human rights culture depends on to interpellate its reader-citizens. Rather than producing empathy, Saleem’s child narrator generates distance and implicates the reader who arrives expecting to witness innocent suffering.

Finally, in “Digital Permission to Narrate: Palestinian Child Content Creators and the Performance of Innocence,” Mary Gryctko turns to contemporary Gaza, asking under what conditions Palestinian children are granted what Edward Said termed “permission to narrate.” Gryctko argues that young content creators savvily perform a childhood defined by innocence and domesticity for international audiences. Eleven-year-old chef Renad Attallah (@renadfromgaza, 1.6 million followers) explicitly appeals to this ideal of childhood in her Instagram bio, stating, in English, that “Children deserve to be children.” Renad and other popular Palestinian child influencers smile as they cook, farm, and care for pets amidst rubble; they do not throw rocks at tanks. These performances grant access to an audience, and a narrative, that has traditionally been denied to Palestinian children, who typically appear in Western media as either corpses or always-already future combatants. At the same time, they erase both the performer’s full subjectivity and the childhood of those who can’t, or won’t, perform in this way—children who are maimed or disabled, who are not able to stifle their rage, child militants.

Together, these papers show that narrative has the potential to be emancipatory, but also to constrain. The child’s narrative can assert their right to freedom; it can also trap the child within constructions of innocence that stifle rather than liberate.