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This paper provides a close analysis of a scandal that broke in Mexico following publication of a book that accused businessmen and politicians of involvement in child trafficking and paedophilia. The book's author, Lydia Cacho, was abducted, imprisoned, threatened with violence and charged with defamation. As further evidence of complicity in the protection of paedophile rings surfaced, a firestorm of public anger and media scrutiny focussed on the plight of Cacho and key political figures including a state governor. A rare political space was thus opened for a debate on child rights. Yet it was a space that CSOS and child rights networks failed to exploit. This paper examines how child rights discourse had limited salience in circumstances where esos were compromised, uncommitted and disunited. Developing the concept of a 'rights effect', we argue that advocacy for child rights must not assume a natural fellowship with discourses of human rights generally, or with women's rights, press freedoms and rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking my cue from a number of theories on paratextuality and specifically peritextuality, this essay argues that the hitherto unaddressed peritextual features of Ana Clavel's Las Violetas son flores del deseo (2007), including illustration, title, jacket copy, and epigraph are central in understanding the strong reactions which the image on the front cover provoked. I argue that the peritextual dimension, which ambiguously anchors but also disrupts meaning(s), works to underpin the novella's central themes of paedophilia, rape, and questions of reader-viewer collusion. Even as we are forced into the position of accomplice, our awareness of the constructedness of the peritextual devices functions to relinquish us from becoming mixed up directly in the brutality which the image suggests. Nevertheless, the peritextual also alerts us to the view that the implied crime is not merely the product of artfulness but also the result of our own imagination and longing for that violence. It will also be argued that the erotic content of the image, which implies both a knowing and an unknowing, perturbs the viewer-reader's comfort zone. Indeed, the image ambiguously plays upon a perceptible incongruity between innocent childhood and sexualized child-teenager and thus disturbs any possibility of offering a safe interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]