Chapter 4 focuses on reforms in the first two decades of this century, which represented, for both Israel and the human rights community, fixing childhood’s spatial and age boundaries in line with legal standards. Key among them were the separation of incarcerated Palestinians under 18 from their elders; the establishment of the world’s only “military youth court”; raising the age of majority under military law; and assessment of the rehabilitation chances of Palestinian youth. Contrary to claims by Israeli officials and their human rights critics, this chapter reveals that some reforms have made no actual difference while others have served to fragment, monitor, and suppress Palestinians. Five broader issues exemplified by these reforms are discussed: the blind spots of human rights actors; the complicity of child law and children’s rights in the oppression of disempowered communities around the world; the growing convergence between military and nonmilitary Israeli law; the multiple forms of separation Israel imposes on Palestinians, which operate to divide and conquer them; and Israel’s attempts at confining Palestinian minds beyond the prison walls. Also examined are Palestinian acts of resistance: running study groups in prison, smuggling sperm of incarcerated men, and conducting readings and discussions in public protests.

This chapter traces a case involving a Muslim wife, Badal, who left behind a marriage contracted for her in her childhood on attaining puberty. Ameer Ali’s judgment in the case of Badal Aurat and Anr. v. Emperor (1891) was cited repeatedly as a precedent for the application of the Islamic legal concept of the “option of puberty” in colonial courtrooms. The case sheds interesting light on layered and dynamic historical structure of “Islamic law” and serves as a counterpoint to the tragic and coeval case of Phulmoni Das studied in the first chapter of the book. This chapter traces the afterlives of the case in colonial courtrooms, not with the intent to celebrate Muslim law in its colonial application, but in order: first, to use an Islamic legal principle – the “option of puberty” – to shine a light on the kinks, quirks, and limitations of the liberal legal principle of the “age of consent”; second, to raise questions about the contrasting visibility of the two cases – Badal and Phulmoni – in the historical scholarship on the age of consent and marriage in India; and third, to ask if it is possible to step away from liberal legal categories to imagine consent without (chronological) age.