| Summary: | This article proposes to question, through a diachronic approach, the category of “childhood victim of war”, reactivated in the post-World War II period. The aim is to see how it is constructed and declined on epistemological, etiological and scientific levels, but also on the side of professional practices at a time when a category derived from psychiatric nosography is being established, particularly in France: the so-called “maladjusted childhood”. In this field, the “Semaines internationales d’étude pour l’enfance victime de la guerre” (SEPEG) – International Study Weeks for Childhood Victim of War -, founded in 1944 in Switzerland, offered an interesting observatory of the role of childhood experts after the war, until their dissolution in 1951.The aim is to shed light on the construction of “expert” knowledge on childhood by the actors, but also on its reception, appropriation and translation, in short, its dissemination, by professionals in social work, medicine and education. This categorization constitutes a step in the development of an expertise and the creation of a consensus through international meetings. This is not done without clashes or debate, for example, on the occasion of the definition of war trauma in children and the recognition of the analytical corpus. Finally, this article addresses the production of knowledge and professional practices around the figure of the child of war, seen through the prism of multiple hybridizations.
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