Children's Rights: Beyond the Impasse (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Social Issues, 2008
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), U.N. General Assembly (1989) is a major breakthrough in defining children as fully human and working to ensure them the attendant benefits worldwide. While children's rights as equal human beings may seem obvious in the 21st century, the politics of establishing and ensuring such rights are contentious. The CRC is a brilliant negotiation of conceptions of the child and international relations, yet certain tensions in the children's rights process lead to a lack of clarity in a global situation that continues to leave millions of children at risk. Analyzing the CRC and related practices from a developmental perspective can help identify obstacles to the advancement of children's rights, especially those related to opportunities for rights-based thinking and the exercise of self-determination and societal-determination rights.In this article, I offer a qualitative analysis of children's rights in the context of what I refer to as the CRC activity-meaning system. I present a theoretical framework for considering this system of policy and practice as enacted in the CRC treaty and related monitoring, reporting, qualifying, and implementing documents. A discourse analysis of conceptions of the child and those responsible for ensuring their rights in seven representative documents (including the CRC Treaty, a report by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, minutes of a U.N. Security Council meeting, reports by a State-Party, and a report by a civil society group in that country) reveals tensions inherent in the CRC activity-meaning system.1 Emerging from this analysis is a tension between children's rights and nation's rights. Created in part via explicit and implicit assumptions about child development in the CRC as these posit responsibilities across actors in the broader CRC system, this tension challenges the implementation of children's rights and the development of children's rights-based understandings. I use this analysis to explain why future research and practice should address the development of children's rights-based understanding not only in terms of maturation or socialization but also as integral to salient conflicts in their every day lives.
The International Journal of Children's Rights, 2013
Children's social policies, which are crucial for attaining social rights and welfare/wellbeing, are influenced by the Child Rights Convention (CRC). However, despite the CRC becoming the unilateral framework for interpreting child wellbeing, its inherent complexities and the persistent deprivations experienced by children in 'developing' countries calls for alternate approaches while formulating children's social policies. Key limitations of the CRC include inappropriate prioritisation of rights when resources are limited or when rights conflict, the apolitical nature of the Convention itself and its failure to integrate into wellbeing analysis the existence of two different welfare states/or lack of it in the world. Despite the usefulness of 'welfare state frameworks' in combating absolute child poverty in the West, it is rarely applied in the South. This article analyses CRC from the political economy perspective focusing on social rights and the 'developing' world which offers a useful critique to the mainstream child rights discourse.
Children are more vulnerable than adults to the conditions under which they live. Hence, they are more affected than any other age group by the actions and inaction of governments and society. Children being children do not have political rights and hence do not have a voice that can be heard. Children constitute over a third of India's population and yet they are only perceived as the ‘future generation’ of economically contributing adults and not as citizens of today. According to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Children - that India ratified in 1992 - all children are born with fundamental rights: Right to Survival, Right to Development, Right to Protection, and Right to Participation. The Constitution of India especially through a series of National Laws and Policies ensures these Rights but enforcement gaps in child related legislation have an altogether a different story to tell. The objective of this paper is to identify these gaps and the reasons behind them. The present paper provides a conceptual understanding of the importance of the political presence of issues and legislation pertaining to children in the socio- political and economic framework of a developing country like India. The economic viability of a whole generation depends on the recognition and representation of core issues, ruling out enforcement gaps through implementation of existing legislation and formulating progressive, developmental and futuristic policies in order to ensure continuity. Keywords: vulnerable, political rights, fundamental rights, United Nations, Constitution, legislation, enforcement gaps, implementation, continuity
2013
This article aims to reinvigorate the debate over the nature and value of the claim that children have children's rights. Whilst the language of rights and children's rights continues to be widely employed, and even relied upon, in many situations involving the legal regulation of children we lack strong child-centred evidence that it is better to regulate children through the lens of children's rights, rather than their 'best interests' or in terms of duties owed to them. My argument proceeds in four stages. Firstly, I distinguish between rights for children and children's rights. Understood in the sense of fundamental human rights, children are plainly rightsholders. The critical debate relates to children's rights. Secondly, I argue that the expressive and procedural reasons for affirming that children hold children's rights are contingent upon improved outcomes. Thirdly, I contend that we do not currently have a child-centred theory of children's rights that improves, or increases the likelihood of improved outcomes in legal practice. This is not a claim that children do not have children's rights. My argument critiques the current potential of both individual children's rights and a rights-based framework of reasoning to improve outcomes for children. Finally, I argue that without a theory of children's rights, we currently have no good evidence that it benefits children to think of them in terms of children's rights in law. This is an optimistic conclusion as it suggests that with greater attention on making decision-making truly childcentred, or explicitly recognizing the inability to do so, the purposes for which we want to believe that children have children's rights might be better achieved than they are at present.