The New Handbook of Children's Rights

Comparative Policy and Practice

Bob Franklin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9781134576906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Law

The new edition of this well established handbook provides up-to-date information on a topic of increasing importance across a range of disciplines and practices. It covers: * the debate concerning children's rights and developments in rights provision over the last twenty years* the impact of recent British legislation on children's rights in key a

Part I
Children’s rights
An overview

1 Children’s rights and media wrongs
Changing representations of children and the developing rights agenda

Bob Franklin

The issue of children’s rights achieved an untypical prominence in the British press during the last week of August 2000. Newspapers reported the public controversy prompted when parents refused consent for an operation to separate their child Mary from her Siamese twin Jodie. Their decision was taken to protect Mary’s right to life, although medical evidence suggested this would result in the death of both twins. The parents’ decision was eventually overturned in the High Court. A chorus of sensational headlines addressed an ethically and legally complex issue. “One Twin Must Die” declared the Mirror (26 August 2000) while the Daily Mail headlined “Why I Must Order Twin Baby To Die – Judge’s heartbreaking decision to separate Siamese sisters” (26 August 2000). The broadsheets offered scarcely more measured judgements with the front page of the Guardian claiming “Twins Must Have Fatal Surgery” (26 August 2000), while The Times headed its coverage “Life And Death Decision For Siamese Twins” (26 August 2000).

Other less dramatic stories sustained the media focus on children’s rights. The Guardian, for example, reported that children conceived by artificial insemination after their father’s death were to enjoy a new right to have their father’s name on their birth certificate (‘‘Rights For Babies on Fatherless Status”, Guardian, 26 August 2000). A local paper in Bradford reported the Council’s decision to evict the parents of children who upset neighbours by playing football in the street. The front page headline of Bradford’s Telegraph and Argus explored the significant issue of the lack of adequate play provision for children in urban environments: “A Red Card For Soccer In Street – Parents of football gangs warned ‘You face eviction’ ” (Telegraph and Argus, 26 August 2000).

Such examples illustrate four typical characteristics of discussions of rights, especially children’s rights. First, the discussion of rights – including questions addressing the competencies necessary to possess them and identifying which claims might properly be considered as rights – has proved perennially contentious. Second, the rights of different individuals may conflict, even in those cases where the claims of all parties are judged legitimate. In the examples above the claims of both Mary and Jodie to the right to life and children’s right to play can be set against council tenants’ rights to live without “disturbance” and “nuisance”. Third, the state is often cast in a contradictory role in rights discourse. On the one hand, the state provides safeguards and protection for individual rights and is often the arbiter in disputes between competing rights claims. On the other, history reveals the state to be the major culprit in matters of rights violation, too frequently eager to encroach on individuals’ freedoms (Beetham, 1995). Fourth, rights claims express a considerable range and diversity encompassing the most significant right to life alongside a child’s right to play.

There is a fifth feature of rights which is noteworthy and arises from the local newspaper report about the ban on street football. When an elected authority is called upon to adjudicate between the conflicting rights claims of two parties (in this case the rights of children to play and the rights of residents to freedom from nuisance and protection of property), that authority is more likely (I would argue, is inherently disposed) to favour the claims of those who possess full citizen rights and are able – at some future date – to hold that body electorally accountable for its decision. Authorities (exemplified here by the local state) are electorally irresponsible to children who, by virtue simply of their age, are denied rights of citizenship.

A concern to address some of these issues informs the twin ambitions for this chapter. First, I intend to outline the substantive themes in the debate between advocates and opponents of rights for children. Second, I wish to argue that the 1990s have witnessed radical shifts in public perceptions of children and childhood, reflecting a growing tendency for news media to report children in ways which are negative and damaging to their interests. Two prominent, but oppositional, images of children can be identified in media accounts. According to the first, children are passive, vulnerable and in need of adult protection (Davis and Bourhill, 1997; Holland, 1992): according to the second, children are unruly and “out of control” (Lumley, 1998; Muncie, 1999; West, 1999). In short, children are increasingly represented as “victims” or “villains”. These images of children have proved influential in shaping public opinion and government policy and created a political climate which is less conducive to the achievement of certain rights, especially participation rights. The “quiet revolution” in children’s rights, which some observers believe has occurred, has been accompanied by a noisy counterblast from the media (Van Bueren, 1996: 27).

But I need to begin by clarifying some of the ambiguities and complexities in the phrase “children’s rights” in order to contextualise the discussions of later chapters.

Children’s rights: definitions

What is a child?

Societies tend to divide their members’ life cycle into the two broad age states of childhood and adulthood. The transition between them is typically associated with the acquisition of distinctive rights, privileges and obligations. Most societies celebrate the achievement of maturity to confirm the significance of this rite de passage. In Britain, the age of 18 signals the age of majority, when individuals formally become adult, although this age boundary creates a number of anomalies. It means, for example, that a nurse or a soldier on active service, or even a parent with two children of her own, may still be defined as “a child” for legal purposes.

In truth, definitions of children, as well as the varied childhoods which children experience, are social constructs shaped by a range of social, historical and cultural factors. Being a child is not a universal experience of any fixed duration, but is differently constructed expressing the divergent gender, class, ethnic or historical locations of particular individuals at particular moments in the development of their societies. Consequently, the sociological study of childhood is more accurately a study of “childhoods” in which the universality of the biological immaturity of children is differently shaped, interpreted and understood by distinctive societies and cultures (James, Jenks and Prout, 1998). Understood in this way, childhood becomes a social institution which the “new paradigm” for the sociology of childhood understands as “a negotiated set of social relationships within which the early years of human life are constituted” (James and Prout, 1997: 2). This suggestion that distinctive histories, as well as cultures, construct different worlds of childhood is reflected in the titles of a growing scholarly literature concerned to explore, for example, Growing Up In Ancient Egypt (Rosalind and Janssen, 1990), Childhood In The Middle Ages (Shahar, 1990) and The Victorian Town Child (Horn, 1997). Other titles such as Shaping Childhood (Cox, 1996), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (James and Prout, 1997) and Contesting Childhood (Wyness, 2000) signal the influence of sociological factors in both the “experience” and “observation” of childhood (Mayall, 1994), while The Erosion of Childhood (Rose, 1991) and The Disappearance of Childhood (Postman, 1983) again identify the shifting, if not transitory, character of childhood. Gittins is undoubtedly correct to challenge the tendency to identify “one child, one childhood” (Gittins, 1998: 3).

The modern conception of childhood, which in Europe dates from the sixteenth century and stresses the innocence, frailty and dependence of children, forcefully ejected children from the worlds of work, sexuality and politics – in which previously they were active participants – and designated the classroom as the major focus for their lives (Plumb, 1972: 153; Aries, 1962: 329; Laslett, 1965: 105; Holt, 1975: 21). Children were no longer allowed to earn money or to decide how to spend their time; they were forced into dependency on adults and obliged to study or play (Pinchbeck and Hewitt, 1973). These significant structural shifts in children’s lives have been accompanied by new “mythologies” which represent childhood as a “golden age” in which children, untroubled by the “adult” concerns of work and economic life, are free to enjoy themselves. Adult platitudes routinely attempt to persuade children that childhood years are the “best years of their lives”. Cute and contented, but dependent on adults and denied autonomy in important decisions concerning their lives, children are encouraged to be “seen and not heard”. John Holt argues that this understanding of childhood is most aptly represented by the metaphor of a walled garden in which children “being small and weak are protected from the harshness of the outside world until they become strong and clever enough to cope with it” (Holt, 1975: 22). Interestingly, English is the only language which uses the word “nursery” to describe a place where both plants and children are nurtured (Franklin, 1986: 9). But the “golden age” mythology is difficult to sustain when confronted by the reality of many children’s experiences, which reflect their powerlessness in relation to adults and their subordinate location in the social institutions of the family and school. The opening lines of Frank McCourt’s novel Angela’s Ashes recall, with much good humour but little sentimentality, the challenges of his own childhood:

When I look back on my own childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood. … Worse than the miserable childhood is the miserable Irish Childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred years. Above all – we were wet. … The rain dampened the city … and drove us into the church – our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. … Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.

(McCourt, 1997: 1–2)

The suggestion that childhood is a “golden age” is difficult to sustain in the face of such an onslaught of childhood recollections.

Two other factors underscore the complexity and diversity of the modern notion of childhood. First, the experiences of children in other countries can radically subvert the mythologised and modern understanding of childhood and point to a potentially arbitrary and inconsistent relativism (Ennew, 1986). Ennew, for example, argues that the conception of childhood which stresses domesticity and dependency is largely a Western definition which places certain children – especially street children – “outside” childhood. The place for childhood to take place, she argues is “inside”; “inside society, inside a family, inside a private dwelling”. Consequently street children are society’s “ultimate outlaws” placed “outside childhood” (see chapter 24). In Britain too, children’s experiences illustrate the tensions which can exist between the realities of childhood and its socially constructed image. Child carers, for example, are not dependent but depended upon; perhaps even to toilet an incontinent or profoundly ill parent (see chapter 12). Similarly, children who have been in care may have found that their previous “family life offered little protection” but “vice versa” required them to “protect their parents” (see chapter 14).

Second, while precise definition is evidently problematic and elusive, a sense and circumstance of powerlessness seems central to the experience of childhood. It is important to recall that the term “child” was used initially to describe anyone of low status, without regard for their age (Hoyles, 1979: 25). Being a child continues to express more about power relationships than chronology, although the two are intimately intertwined. Children’s powerlessness reflects their limited access to economic resources, their exclusion from political participation and the corresponding cultural image of childhood as a state of weakness, dependency and incompetence. Definitions of a “child” and “childhood” entail more than a specification of an age of majority; they articulate a particular society’s values and attitudes towards children. These adult perceptions and values are typically disdaining and ageist (Franklin and Franklin, 1990).

Rights

The definition of rights is perhaps less problematic, although it has not always been so. In the early 1970s, for example, children’s rights were described as “a slogan in search of a definition” (Rodham, 1973: 487), but across the subsequent three decades an expansive academic literature focused on children’s rights, in tandem with a growing awareness of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, has mapped out a good deal of the rights terrain.

The greater part of the academic discussion of children’s rights has been conceptual in character and concerned to: establish the legitimacy of children’s claims for rights (Alderson, 2000; Franklin, 1995; Freeman, 1985; Harris, 1996); to construct elaborate classificatory schemes for children’s rights (Hart, 1992; Rogers and Wrightsman, 1978; Wald, 1979); or to examine children’s competence to make decisions (Hutchby and Moran-Ellis, 1998; Mortier, 1999). More radical studies have explored the possibilities for extending children’s political rights (Children’s Rights Alliance for England, 2000; Franklin, 1986 and 1992; Harris, 1984; and Holt, 1975) or attempted to develop a political economy of ageism (Franklin and Franklin, 1990). Inevitably some scholars work has argued against children’s claims to certain rights (Purdy, 1994; Scarre, 1980). Others have explored a range of possible institutional mechanisms for implementing children’s rights, including a children’s ombudsman (Flekkøy, 1991; Verhellen and Spiesschaert, 1989), a children’s commissioner (Newell, 2000), conventions on rights for children (Saporiti, 1998; Verhellen, 1999) and children’s rights officers and self-advocacy groups such as Article 12 in the UK (Franklin and Franklin, 1996). There is also a growing literature examining the ways in which charitable and voluntary organisations can incorporate their commitment to children’s rights in the practice of welfare professionals who work with children (Cuninghame, 1999).

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has also substantially increased public awareness of children’s rights. The Convention, which has attracted an unprecedented number of signatory countries to ratify its principles (only Somalia and the US are not signatories), embraces a comprehensive set of civil, economic, social and cultural rights which it argues the global community of children should ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Children’s Rights: An Introduction
• Part I: Children’s Rights: An Overview
• Part II: Children's Rights: The Changing Legal Framework
• Part III: Children's Rights: Cases for Action
• Part IV: Children’s Rights: Listening to Children and Young People’s Voices
• Part V: Children’s Rights: Comparative Perspectives