Search results

Despite the fact that the rights of the child began to be discussed in the nineteenth century, they came to the fore after the world wars in the twentieth century. Children, who were considered to belong to their fathers during the agricultural capitalism period before the Industrial Revolution, were also used for domestic labour. Children began to break away from their homes with the Industrial Revolution, after this long period of almost no rights. During this period, child labour, which is cheaper than adult labour and seen as the lever of capitalist accumulation, has become an important part of production. In the second half of the nineteenth century, through the 1920s, called the ‘child rescue age’, compulsory education came to the fore as a way of disciplining children. The perception that children are a group that needs to be protected as a separate category and not as a property reveals the necessity to regulate their working conditions and to ensure their rights. In this regard, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child realised the first real progress in 1924. Then, after the Second World War, which brought children's rights to almost a halt, the Declaration of Rights of the Child was signed in 1959. Both of the declarations rely heavily on protection and care services. The touchstone of the development of child rights is the Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 20 November 1989. The Convention became the human rights convention that was approved by the largest number of countries ever. It is the only human rights convention that uniquely combines civil, political, social, cultural, and human rights. Despite all these developments, children continue not to be regarded as subjects and to be exploited in the production of surplus value as the reserve army of labour.

As an independent children’s rights institution (ICRI), the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland (CYPCS) has contributed to significant changes in children’s rights in Scotland (e.g., the implementation of the UN CRC in Scots national law). Since the establishment of CYPCS in 2004, children living in Scotland have come to be seen as holders of rights. Yet this change has been neither linear nor certain. Instead, the CYPCS has contended with pressures to demean children’s rights, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the CYPCS continues to advocate for children’s rights and interests, this ICRI looks forward to bolstering decision making of young people and ensuring security of their rights, which in turn will inform the efforts of the CYPCS.

A healthy society consists of physically, mentally and psychologically healthy individuals. In this respect, it is crucial to raise children as healthy individuals in every sense. Children's rights can be defined as the rights stipulating to protect our children from harm and abuse; give them a chance to be raised as emotionally healthy individuals and provide their basic needs such as nutrition and shelter. The child should have the right to adequate nutrition and a safe haven. In this context, it should be a primary goal for everyone to enable children, who are the future of society, to benefit from their physical environments as equally as possible.

In the beginning the Philosophers were the ones to school us on how to consider and treat our children. In Plato's Republic, Socrates sketched a place where the nursing and parenting of children is carried out communally (Platone, 1994, p. 172). Not much later, instead, Aristotle claimed that children belong to their own parents inasmuch as they beget them (Aristotele, 1999, pp. 345, 18–24). Much later, first Augustine, then Thomas, and later still Locke and Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant, all had a great deal to say on children and parents, as well as on children's status (Archard, 1993, Chap. 1; Blustein, 1982). The last great master who told us who children are and how they should be treated is perhaps John Stuart Mill: children are immature beings who cannot have the very same rights and liberties as adults (Mill, 1910, p. 73).

The child is at the centre of all Models of Child Health Appraised research and indeed all primary care delivery for children. Appraising models of primary care for children is incomplete without ensuring that experiences of primary care, design, treatment, management and outcomes are optimal for the child. However, the principle of child centricity is not implicit in many healthcare systems and in many aspects of life, yet it is extremely important for optimal child health service design and child health. By exploring the changing concept of ‘childhood’, we understand better the emergence of the current attitude towards children and their role in today’s Europe and the evolution of child rights. Understanding child centricity, and the role of agents acting on behalf of the child, allows us to identify features of children’s primary care systems that uphold the rights of a child to optimum health. This is placed against the legal commitments made by the countries of the European Union and European Economic Area to ensure that children’s rights are respected.

Is more child participation always better for child rights advocacy? That is the question I examine, in this chapter, as I analyse advocacy for child rights in India that led to the adoption of the landmark Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (the ‘POCSO Act’). Through ethnographic fieldwork with non-government organisations (NGOs) and a narrative analysis of interviews and awareness material, I tell the story of how a combination of adult-led but child-participatory advocacy brought about a new, de-tabooised way of talking about child sexual abuse. By applying the theoretical lens of ‘critical child rights studies’, I suggest how we can conceptualise a critical perspective on child participation in child rights advocacy. First, adults’ multiple and, at times, conflicting roles in children’s lives – as advocates, protectors, and abusers – needs to be recognised. Second, children should participate in advocacy activities where they can have meaningful influence and be part of the conversation. This may not necessarily occur in adult spaces, where their participation remains token. Finally, I argue that child participation should never turn into a responsibilisation of children.

Using an ecological model of child participation and drawing on newsletter data from schools across the United States of America (USA), this chapter statistically explores five state factors linked with school protests against gun violence: (1) children’s neighbourhood opportunity; (2) race/ethnicity; (3) voter preference for either a Republican or a Democratic president; (4) child participation policies; and (5) gun laws/violence/ownership. The chapter explores factors linked to both student participation in protests and student nonparticipation in protests that take place at their schools. Three factors were found to be associated with participation and nonparticipation: children’s neighbourhood opportunity, voters’ preference, and participation policies. Findings suggest that Democratic-voting states, mediated by education opportunity, predict the frequency of student protests against gun violence. In Republican-voting states, where education opportunity does not mediate the frequency of school protests, students still organised and participated in protests but to a lesser extent. In addition, states with high overall children’s neighbourhood opportunity and voting student education board members are highly likely to have non-protesting students in schools with protests. The chapter presents five conclusions from these results for the positive and negative exercise of child participation rights and considers what further multilevel explorations can be done to further test the framework employed for this analysis.

Recent years have seen growing concern about the climate crisis. Lack of adequate attention on this issue from governments and industries has prompted social movements against climate change. Youth activism has been particularly effective at advancing the cause, especially campaign work by children, most notably Greta Thunberg. The tourism industry impacts global carbon emissions, particularly due to international travel. Sustainable tourism is therefore becoming increasingly important in order to help respond to the climate crisis and protect the individual rights of citizens, including children. Children have unique and important insights to offer, yet they are in a democratically weak position given that they cannot vote and are often wholly reliant on others to represent their interests. However, when we allow children to occupy legal and political spaces and support them with participatory democracy, such as through supporting the child's right to protest or supporting strategic litigation, significant progress can be made for climate justice and a more sustainable future. Adults have a responsibility to respond positively to the work of youth activists to help nurture and encourage the environmentally conscious attitudes of children into adulthood.