@article{article_1970441, title={Children As a Source of Exploitation: The Neglect of the Lives Of The Children In Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad}, journal={Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi Fen-Edebiyat Fakültesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi}, volume={50}, pages={293–301}, year={2026}, url={https://izlik.org/JA88EY89LF}, author={Yıldırım, Melek}, keywords={Children, rights, discrimination, neglect ans exploitation}, abstract={Underground Railroad (2016), a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for fiction in 2017, focuses on antebellum Southern America during the nineteenth century in an alternative history fiction. The existence of a wide range of representatives of child neglect and abuse of Afro-American enslaved children in the novel stimulates a need to deal with the neglect of the children Underground Railroad, penned by Colson Whitehead in the framework of decolonial childhood theory in the framework of postcolonial literary criticism by Manfred Liebel to learn the way of protecting children from neglect, exploitation, and violence by benefiting from children’s rights. It is pointed out that all the enslaved Afro-American children portrayed in the novel are neglected, ignored, and outcasted in the colonial period of America. Not only are their fundamental requirements not met, but even their right to live is taken from them without giving any punishment to the criminals, because the enslaved children are not given the right of citizenship in the colonial period. Thus, their civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights are denied by the white supremacists. All in all, the children in the novel reveal the way they are exploited systematically in the process of colonial conduct before Emancipation in America.}, number={2}