Collective Care and Distributed Responsibility

Sor Juana lived in a convent, a collective structure; while imperfect, it offered her certain protections and intellectual community unavailable to isolated women. Contemporary child welfare often isolates children within nuclear families, making them vulnerable to concentrated harm with no witnesses or intervention. Sor Juana's context—and Indigenous and African-descended child-rearing traditions across cultures—offers an alternative: collective responsibility for children's wellbeing. This means villages, extended families, schools, communities, and institutions all recognize themselves as accountable for children's safety, education, and thriving. It means creating structures where harm to children is visible, where multiple adults know and care for each child, where responsibility is distributed so no single person wields unchecked power. Collective care does not mean institutional care or state control; it means rich networks of relationships and reciprocal obligation. For children's rights, this concept challenges the notion that child protection is private family business. It insists that children belong to communities, that we all bear responsibility for them, and that systems designed around collective accountability are more protective than isolated nuclear families can ever be. This reframes child welfare from individual rescue to collective transformation.