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As numerous scholars have noted, the law takes a strikingly incoherent approach to adolescent reproduction. States overwhelmingly allow a teenage girl to independently consent to pregnancy care and medical treatment for her child, and even to give up her child for adoption, all without notice to her parents, but require parental notice or consent for abortion. This chapter argues that this oft-noted contradiction in the law on teenage reproductive decision-making is in fact not as contradictory as it first appears. A closer look at the law’s apparently conflicting approaches to teenage abortion and teenage childbirth exposes common ground that scholars have overlooked. The chapter compares the full spectrum of minors’ reproductive rights and unmasks deep similarities in the law on adolescent reproduction – in particular an undercurrent of desire to punish (female) teenage sexuality, whether pregnant girls choose abortion or childbirth. It demonstrates that in practice, the law undermines adolescents’ reproductive rights, whichever path of pregnancy resolution they choose. At the same time that the law thwarts adolescents’ access to abortion care, it also fails to protect adolescents’ rights as parents. The analysis shows that these two superficially conflicting sets of rules in fact work in tandem to enforce a traditional gender script – that self-sacrificing mothers should give birth and give up their infants to better circumstances, no matter the emotional costs to themselves. This chapter also suggests novel policy solutions to the difficulties posed by adolescent reproduction by urging reforms that look to third parties other than parents or the State to better support adolescent decision-making relating to pregnancy and parenting.

Legal standards that allow teens to make health care decisions, or any important decisions, must account for the contingency and variability of minors’ capacity. Traditional law denied minors’ legal authority to make any decisions, giving all power to parents. This rule goes too far; the Supreme Court has held that minors have constitutionally protected autonomy-based rights, and modern views about adolescence are inconsistent with the rule. The question is how and where to draw lines.

Legal standards are based on minors’ evolving maturity, policy favoring decisions that follow medical advice, and policy supporting parental authority. This paper uses four hard cases to show how these considerations factor into legal rules.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the situation on the unaccompanied foreign minors in the Italian legal system, paying special attention to the Lampedusa humanitarian emergency in 2011.

The legal treatment of these subjects is on the borderline between two distinct sets of laws: those for minors, based on principles of protection and support; and those for immigrants based on public security and therefore inspired by principles of control and defense. For this reason the question of the legal treatment of unaccompanied foreign minors is a decidedly complex matter because it requires the assumption of a clear responsibility on the part of the host State that, in accordance with international conventions, must provide for the welfare of a child by ensuring a healthy development and securing their fundamental rights.

The paper examines the legal measures regulating the status of unaccompanied foreign minors in the Italian legal system, in order to understand if they are efficient in giving protection and offering integration to these minors.

The paper offers insights into the most vulnerable category of illegal immigrants.

American sex education is continually under fire due to conflicting morals surrounding hegemonic sociocultural norms. These programs, and ultimately the students, are often victims of information inequities which leverage adult control over minors to prevent access to sexual health information. Withholding salient sexual health information infringes on intertwined tenets of human rights, such as education and information access. Spurred by recent disputes and barriers to updating unethical curricula in the states of Arizona and Texas, this chapter uses a human rights lens to explore the current information inequities in K-12 sexual education and students’ precarious positions in policy spaces. This framework demonstrates how libraries are uniquely protected spaces for intellectual freedom and the roles librarians can and should play as sexual health information providers in order to help students overcome information inequities. This chapter will provide recommendations for librarians and other educators to inform and organize advocacy as well as leverage current library operations to support adolescents’ sexual health literacy.

The Edmund Edelman Children’s Court is a juvenile dependency courthouse in Los Angeles designed with bright murals, open play spaces, and modified courtrooms to be “child-sensitive” and “family-friendly.” Through a recounting of the political and cultural forces at play building up to its construction, I argue that the decisions to build a “child-sensitive” court confirm the carceral containment of the culpable black adult. This article represents an inquiry into the cultural logic of the court’s construction, revealing the relationship between raced constructions of innocence and guilt. This study draws from five months of fieldwork conducted in the Edelman Children’s Court.

Reports of human trafficking within the football industry have become a topic of academic, political and media concern. The movement of and trade in aspirant young (male) footballers from West Africa to Europe, and more recently to Asia, dominates these accounts. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper provides an overview of scholarship on this topic, with a specific focus on exploring how this form of human trafficking intersects with the broader debates over children’s rights in the context of exploitation tied to the irregular forms of migration.

The paper illustrates how popular narratives associated with the trafficking of young West African footballers mimic stereotypical portrayals of child trafficking, which have implications for the solutions put forward. It is argued that popular representations of football-related child trafficking are problematic for several reasons, but two are emphasised here. First, they perpetuate a perception that the mobility of young African footballers entails a deviant form of agency in need of fixing, while simultaneously disassociating the desire to migrate from the broader social structures that need to be addressed. Second, and relatedly, they result in regulations and policy solutions that are inadvertently reductive and often at odds with the best interests of the children they seek to protect.

This an original study of the narratives associated with the trafficking of young West African footballers and those of child trafficking.

Inheritance practice and rules are important keys to understanding the property rights of any rural society. This is especially true for Swedish rural society, traditionally predominated by freeholders. Freeholders, unlike tenants, owned their own farms. This means among other things that their children had the right of inheritance to the landed property.

Marshall (1950, p. 10) saw civil citizenship rights as concerning individual liberties, such as freedom of speech, property ownership rights, personal liberties and rights to justice. Women obtained many of these rights only after the acknowledgement of their political citizenship (Walby, 1997, p. 175) and much later than men did. Civil citizenship includes a whole range of issues which cannot be covered in this book. This book focuses on the gender aspects of ownership and land succession. Land succession is interrelated with a series of other civil citizenship rights issues such as access to training and education. While succession is also interrelated with issues of social (social security eligibility), economic (division of labour in the families) and political (political participation and representation) citizenship issues, these relations are to be discussed later.

Purpose – This chapter has three major points. First, I present the legal context that guides pediatric clinical interactions in the United States. Second, I argue that pediatric care is incomplete if the child patient is not identified as a knowledgeable and serious resource, thereby illustrating the concept called child inclusion. Third, it recognizes the child as a research participant.

Methodology – This chapter will present an argument for the concept of child inclusion by presenting limited data from research at a private clinic in the state of Florida, USA. It will present recommendations for the inclusion of children in the pediatric setting and comment on the child-centered method used for this research. The concept of child inclusion acknowledges the agency of a child in health care and places the child at the forefront of research. It presents qualitative data from ongoing research on indicators for child inclusion in a pediatric clinical setting, assuming that such indicators can only manifest in a partnership model of clinical interaction, where physician authority does not dominate clinical care and patients are actively involved in the negotiation of their health care.

Findings – I present recommendations for the inclusion of children in the pediatric setting and comment on the child-centered method used for this research. The concept of child inclusion acknowledges the agency of a child in health care and places the child at the forefront of research. This work calls for the child to no longer be in the background of pediatric care and social science research.

At what age should children and teenagers have access to certain subject materials and/or the adult collection in libraries? Parents, school teachers and administrators, organized and unorganized religious, politicians, and the judiciary are among those willing to expound on their firm conviction that certain materials and subjects are harmful to the young. There are also those who, although uncertain about the effect of certain materials and subjects, are willing to opt for restricting access for the young and to demand that librarians be responsible for policing such action. Librarians generally share these ambivalent feelings about library materials and access for children and young adults. Aware of the possible adverse reaction of adults if alleged controversial materials are placed either in the children's or the young adult collection, librarians often choose not to select such materials. A recent letter to American Libraries suggested that librarians place controversial children's or young adult material into adult collections only, thus avoiding confrontations with those adults concerned about “harmful” matter reaching minors. The writer stated that everyone would win; the material would be available, but objections based on access to the material by the young would be thwarted. The writer did not seem to anticipate problems in determining at what age the young person would be allowed access to the adult collection containing this material, nor was a method proposed for defining either controversial or noncontroversial material. However, the “way out” proposed is actually used by some public libraries in the U.S., although a cursory look at library problems over objections to library materials for the young reveals titles and subjects that would be classified as noncontroversial by many.