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This opening chapter of the edited volume, Childhood, Youth and Activism: Demands for Rights and Justice from Young People and Their Advocates, explores activism and advocacy – by and for children and young people. It begins by considering how activism has been understood in the scholarly literature, before making a case for a broad and inclusive conceptualisation of what counts as this particular form of social action. Relatedly, it examines the contours of the relationship between activism and advocacy, drawing attention to the ways in which these concepts converge, an issue that is particularly salient when applied to the categories of child and youth. Themes that emerge in research on child and youth activism are then drawn out and we identify some of the key issues that animate this work across various disciplines. These include observations that young people have long been central to social movements, the role of social media in youth activism, the nature of child and adult relationships in social movement organisations, and some of the issues that arise for young activists in relation to intersectional identities. To this we add debates regarding the politics of recognition, questions of voice and agency, and responsibility and their temporal registers. This discussion also foreshadows themes that emerge in the chapters across this volume. Finally, we offer a reflection on some of the conceptual issues raised when considering the book in its entirety, including those of voice, responsibility for the future, the politics of possibility and hope, and the many different forms and practices that activism and advocacy for and by young people take.

This chapter offers a critical examination of children and young people’s participation in Australia’s official celebrations of the International Year of the Child (IYC) in 1979. While the global objectives of IYC strongly reflected ‘protectionist’ or ‘welfarist’ approaches to children’s rights, the chapter shows that, at a local level, the year was also shaped by alternative notions of children’s liberation that had emerged in the preceding decade and a new emphasis on children’s voices by policymakers, advocates and researchers. The chapter explores how these ideas were incorporated at a national level before closely examining three initiatives in New South Wales (NSW), the Australian state where the emphasis on children’s voices was taken furthest. The initiatives examined are: (1) the establishment of a Kids Council to provide input into the state’s response to IYC; (2) the organisation of a Youth Forum for high school students; and (3) the provision of funding for the ‘Speakout’ camp for children in out-of-home ‘care’. None of these initiatives approached the radical forms of democratic participation envisioned by liberationists. Nonetheless, they attest to the wider credence given to ideas of children’s self-determination in this period, well before the formalisation of children’s ‘participation’ rights in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989). The selected case studies also provide context to more recent debates over the inclusion of children and young people’s voices in decision-making processes, demonstrating how concerns around tokenism, exclusivity and adult-centricism manifested and were navigated at a time when the concepts of participation and voice remained relatively novel.

This chapter explores what it means for adults to claim child rights. Focussing on activism against institutional child abuse, it considers the question of what happens to the mobilisation of child rights discourse when the person claiming those rights is no longer a child. In other words, how is the concept of child rights used retrospectively and what does this reveal, both about childhood and about child rights? The chapter begins with the contention that childhood needs to be understood as not only a concept that speaks to the lives of children, their experiences, and their place within the social structure. Rather, we suggest that a more expansive view enables recognition of the enduring significance of childhood in adults’ lives. We illustrate this argument with examples of the formation of collective identities based on childhood experiences, before turning to the ways that child rights are marshalled by adults in activism, in commissions of inquiry, and in the legal sphere. Throughout the chapter, we consider issues of temporality. We explore the ways in which adult survivors of childhood abuse retrospectively claim rights denied to them in the past and we examine how activism, official inquiries, and legal mechanisms position adults in relation to their childhood selves. We then consider some of the dilemmas that arise with retrospective rights claims; particularly questions of retroactivity in relation to responsibility and redress for past abuse. Finally, we explore the temporal repositioning of childhood and how past and present is bridged. This occurs through survivor activism and, in more formal mechanisms such as inquiries, by focussing on how people are represented as child victims in the past and survivors in the present.

In this chapter, we explore a form of young people’s activism taking place in a central societal institution and a central forum in the lives of young people – school – that we conceptualise as ‘active equity’. We present three cases from northern Finland: reindeer herders smashing potatoes, immigrant youth requesting a key and young people lying on sofas during breaks between lessons. We suggest that these acts, in the contexts in which they took place, were an unrecognised form of social action for equity undertaken by young people. We argue that the concept of active equity helps examine the assertion of rights and claims for justice by children and young people. In each case we present, young people make visible an inequity in their contexts: the reindeer herding way of life was overlooked in school, asylum-seeking or refugee immigrants were excluded from the main school building, and non-high-performing young people were excluded from comfortable areas during lessons. These, in turn, linked to broader societal inequities in Finland, a country commonly known for its equality. In school, young people are commonly viewed through intersecting discourses of democracy and education. In both discourses, they are commonly positioned as learners rather than speakers. Through active equity, young people subtly imprint themselves on the scene of education in new ways. For this reason, their acts of active equity remain typically either unrecognised or seen as oppositional in school.

Climate change is recognised as a severe threat to human and planetary wellbeing. Many children and young people around the world have chosen resistance as their form of resilience in the face of the climate and biodiversity crises that threaten their current and future wellbeing. Their activism has widened the discourse pertaining to the climate emergency from a narrow focus on technical and scientific sources, bringing the discussion into broader public consciousness. In Aotearoa (New Zealand), the context for youth climate activism also reflects commitments to Māori, the Indigenous people, and to Pacific Peoples, given the ongoing impacts of histories of colonisation. This chapter draws from a range of focus group interviews with young Aotearoa (New Zealand) high school climate activists, and Māori and Pacific children and young people ranging in age from 10 into their 20s. Data were gathered during a recent small-scale project to develop a wellbeing guide which accompanies a climate change education programme for schools. It identifies the collective, collaborative leadership exhibited by these young people of diverse backgrounds, as well as their sophisticated analysis and advocacy for urgent remedies to address the climate crisis. It is argued that, instead of focussing on the blinkered continuation of restrictive assessment-driven pedagogies, teachers need to meet the moment of the current convergence of inter-related crises which include, along with the climate emergency, biodiversity loss, pandemic related exacerbation of socio-economic inequities, global conflict, and the unsustainable agenda of current global neoliberal economics. This can be done by supporting children and young people with knowledge and skills for climate action as they seek hope through active participation in endeavours to reshape their potential futures.

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.

Since 2018, millions of students have mobilised as organisers, advocates and activists for action on global warming in movements like the School Strike 4 Climate. In Australia, an estimated 500,000 school students, some as young as five, and predominantly girls and young women, have taken part in coordinated school strikes, protest actions online and in cities and towns around the country (Hilder & Collin, 2022). While children and young people have long been central to politics, this more recent mass mobilisation raises new questions about how the various new forms of political participation and expression adopted by young people are significantly reshaping political norms, values and practices in ostensibly liberal democratic regimes like Australia. In this chapter, we propose that close attention be given to whether young people’s political views and demands for political recognition, rights and climate justice is re-constituting politics and whatever passes for ‘democracy’ in contemporary societies. Drawing on a study of the student climate movement in Australia, this chapter briefly describes the emergence of the movement globally and locally. Deploying Isin’s notion of ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin, 2008), we examine the ways young climate activists are engaged in critical, performative, political practice, making claims for political recognition, rights and climate justice.

Using data from a feminist discourse analysis of comments on Facebook news articles, this research outlines backlash and regulatory practices directed towards youth activists Greta Thunberg, X González and Malala Yousafzai. A conceptual framework of semiotic violence highlights how these comments function to silence, delegitimise, vilify and punish sociopolitically active girls who challenge the status quo. The first mode of semiotic violence works to symbolically annihilate girl activists by silencing or rendering their political contributions invisible. The most obvious manifestation of this is instructing girls to shut up and go away. Additionally, their activism is ignored by refusals to acknowledge it as appropriate through suggestions they focus on gender-normative activities, such as domestic chores, playing with dolls and finding boyfriends. Undermining girls’ agency by describing them as puppets, mouthpieces, script readers, pawns and tools is also common. Here, girls’ contributions are rendered invisible through implications that they are being brainwashed and manipulated. The second mode of semiotic violence reinforces ideologies that girls are not politically competent and punishes them for being outspoken. This includes explicitly discrediting girls’ knowledge and abilities. Regulating their emotionality is also prevalent. This is consistent with Liberal political theory which justified women’s exclusion from public life by associating men with reason and women with emotion. Finally, insults degrade them for transgressing into a space demarcated as an adult and masculine realm. The semiotic violence directed towards these ‘girl power’ figures highlights that many people do not believe girls have the right to assert their sociopolitical opinion.