Child- and youth protection and daycare history since the 1970s in Luxembourg (CHILDLUX)

The ChildLux – Child Protection project aims to document the history and development of child and youth protection and its legal framework from the 1970s to the present day. The project consists of two parts. One focuses on the history of children and youth daycare, and the other focuses on youth protection in Luxembourg from 1970 to the present day. The project aims to write a social history of childhood in Luxembourg based on oral testimonies and written sources. It is intended to record testimonies in detail and to collect written documents such as reports, newspapers’ clippings and scientific articles that can help us to understand the history of childhood in Luxembourg. The witnesses involved will consist of people who have experienced this history first-hand, including former children in care, former state officers, social workers and former managers of care institutions. Our goal is to create a comprehensive social history of childhood in Luxembourg by drawing on a combination of oral testimonies and written sources. We will record these oral testimonies and conduct individual in-depth interviews with both witnesses and experts. This seminar will discuss the evolution of childhood and childcare, as well as the development of non-formal structures, from historical and political perspectives. This type of seminar, known as “witness seminars” is an oral history methodology aimed at bringing together a group of people who have experienced history unravelling in the first person to understand history from the inside, starting with its motivations and underlying mechanisms, which the sparse documents do not reveal. This is supplemented by archival research, secondary sources’ review and semi-structured individual interviews.