Conclusion
The Nordic evacuations of Finnish war children resembled in many ways the evacuations of war children that took place in other parts of Europe during WWII, but there were a few distinctive features.
The Nordic evacuation involved two countries, Finland and Sweden, one a belligerent and the other announcing itself neutral. The Swedish Government was not explicitly involved in the larger evacuation schemes, which were organized and led by NGOs. The Swedish Government's evasion was related to war politics and more specifically the Swedish neutrality stance. The Finnish Government had a more explicit role in the evacuations, including the administration of the return to Finland. The evacuations were motivated as a humanitarian effort to save children, but political issues were present and the responsibility of the evacuations oscillated between NGOs and governments.In a European context, large-scale evacuations of children without their parents from war zones are more or less nonexistent today. State governments and NGOs carry out extensive efforts on humanitarian grounds, aiming to save children's lives, but the conditions for such interventions have changed. Currently, French anthropologist Didier Fassin (2012) argues that humanitarianism has a double register related to geographical location:
...on a global scale it is obvious that humanitarian government displays a dual model. In poor countries it deals with large and often undifferentiated populations, for whom mass initiatives are set in place. In rich countries, it is faced with individuals, whose narratives it examines and whose bodies it scrutinizes. (Fassin 2012, p. 253)
Today, unaccompanied children are construed as particularly vulnerable and “child objects” in need of care and special protection due to separation from parents and traumatic experiences of war and flight (Martin 2011; Stretmo 2014). A construction of unaccompanied refugee children as vulnerable and exposed objects of care corresponds to the image of evacuated war children during WWII. The war children were construed as fragile objects that had to be moved away from danger to more safe zones. But there is an important difference. The evacuated war children in WWII were moved by adults, while the unaccompanied refugee children of today are on the move themselves. In this regard they are “agential child subjects” (Martin 2011) fleeing from danger in their homeland to another country to seek refuge and asylum, which challenges dominant constructions in Europe of refugee children as particularly vulnerable and exposed. Moreover, since the latter construction is significant in the children’s narratives in their process of seeking asylum on humanitarian ground, the agency of unaccompanied refugee children runs the risk of being seen as a problem or a dilemma.