“If pain could speak" through the cinematic lens: structural violence and children’s lived realities in Capernaum

Abstract

Children’s rights violations are often rendered invisible precisely because they occur not through dramatic acts of violence, but through the slow accumulation of ordinary social, legal, and institutional failures. This thesis examines how Capernaum (Labaki, 2018), a Lebanese film following Zain, a child without legal documentation, cinematically constructs the gap between children’s rights in law and children’s lived realities as a form of structural violence. The central research question asks: how does Capernaum cinematically construct this gap as structural violence, and through which cinematic techniques does it make that gap visible, affective, and recognisable to the viewer? The thesis develops an original analytical framework by bringing together three mutually reinforcing fields: structural violence theory, drawing on Galtung and Kent; the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a normative benchmark; and human rights cinema scholarship, drawing on Nash, Shapiro, Kozloff, Lebeau, and Hemelryk Donald. Through close reading of seven selected scenes, the thesis examines how the film constructs legal invisibility, educational exclusion, child labour, child marriage, parentification, delayed voice, and belated recognition as a connected chain of rights denial rather than a series of isolated events. The findings show that Capernaum does not simply represent children’s suffering. It cinematically constructs a world in which children become visible to institutions only when they are criminalised, publicly exposed, or already harmed beyond repair. Structural violence operates here not through one perpetrator or one act, but through the normalisation of conditions that make childhood impossible as a protected condition for the children living inside them. The thesis contributes to children’s rights scholarship by showing that legal entitlements must be studied as lived conditions, not only as formal protections. It contributes to structural violence theory by demonstrating that childhood intensifies the meaning of indirect harm in ways Galtung’s original framework does not fully address. It contributes to human rights cinema scholarship by demonstrating that close cinematic reading is itself a method for producing human rights knowledge, accessing forms of evidence that legal and sociological analysis alone cannot reach. Together, these contributions show that cinema is not a secondary tool for studying human rights, but a critical site where the gap between legal promise and lived reality becomes visible, affective, and politically legible.