The Routledge International Handbook of Young Children's Rights

Jane Murray, Beth Blue Swadener, Kylie Smith, Jane Murray, Beth Blue Swadener, Kylie Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367142018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000682168
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Written to commemorate 30 years since the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), The Routledge International Handbook of Young Children's Rights reflects upon the status of children aged 0–8 years around the world, whether they are respected or neglected, and how we may move forward. With contributions from international experts and emerging authorities on children's rights, Murray, Blue Swadener and Smith have produced this highly significant textbook on young children's rights globally.

Containing sections on policy, along with rights to protection, provision and participation for young children, this book combines discussions of children's rights and early childhood development, and investigates the crucial yet frequently overlooked link between the two. The authors examine how policy, practice and research could be utilised to address the barriers to universal respect for children, to create a safer and more enriching world for them to live and flourish in.

The Routledge International Handbook of Young Children's Rights is an essential resource for students and academics in early childhood education, social work and paediatrics, as well as for researchers, policymakers, leaders and practitioners involved in the provision of children's services and paedeatric healthcare, and international organisations with an interest in or ability to influence national or global policies on children's rights.

PART 1

Policy affecting young children’s rights

1

Introduction

The state of young children’s rights

Jane Murray,Beth Blue Swadener and Kylie Smith

The Routledge International Handbook of Young Children’s Rights marks the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 1989). The UNCRC frames the human rights specifically for children, defining a child in its first article as ‘a person below the age of 18, unless the laws of a particular country set the legal age for adulthood younger’ (OHCHR, 1989). The Convention is a legacy of Eglantyne Jebb’s work to secure the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child (League of Nations, 1924), the first recognition by international governments of children’s rights. However, nearly a century later, ‘much remains to be done’ (UNICEF, 2014a): many children are still at profound risk and in great need (UNICEF, 2018a).

Over the three decades since the UNCRC was adopted, powerful research evidence has built to reveal the importance for lifetime outcomes of the early childhood phase, from conception to 8 years (Heckman and Masterov, 2007; The Lancet, 2016; UNICEF, 2014b). Longitudinal studies have emerged showing the benefits of nurturing and stimulating early childhood experiences (e.g. Bakken, Brown and Downing, 2017; Schweinhart et al., 2005) alongside exponential developments in the field of neuroscience that reveal infants’ significant capabilities, where previously these were hidden from view (Centre on the Developing Child, 2007; Goswami and Bryant, 2007; McCain and Mustard, 1999; Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000; Shore, 1997). This evidence has persuaded governments internationally of the benefits of investment in young children’s early experiences, exemplified by the first global target for early childhood development: ‘By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education’ (United Nations, 2015). Yet it may be argued that the attention given to school readiness in this international target aligns with an agenda more attuned to an adult concern – economics – than young children’s needs and rights (Brooks and Murray, 2018; Moss and Urban, 2018; Murray, 2017a). Dominant views about children are primarily centred on the notion that they are ‘pre-adult becomings’ (Holloway and Valentine, 2000, p. 5) or ‘deferred’ citizens (Cheney, 2004, p. 13), meaning they have little agency to influence change until they are older or reach an age of majority. Valerie Polakow (1993) and others have long argued that existential framings of childhood are as critical as instrumental ones that emphasise cost–benefit analysis or later pay-offs of investments in early childhood.

The growing awareness across the world of the importance of early childhood has highlighted the need to look afresh at UNCRC (OHCHR, 1989) and to examine its fitness for purpose in respect of the rights of infants and children up to 8 years in an array of sociocultural contexts, including the Global South. This need was recognised in the UNCRC General Comment 7 (GC7) (OHCHR, 2006) and has also been addressed in a few sources in the literature (Alderson, Hawthorne and Killen, 2008; Kanyal, 2014). However, given the intensity of global policy, research and practice focusing on the early childhood years in recent decades, relatively little discourse has attended to rights as they are afforded specifically to infants and young children. Consultation with young children about matters affecting them is increasingly advocated and included in child rights-based research and programme planning designs (e.g., Lundy and Swadener, 2015; Murray, 2017b; Smith, 2013).

The UNCRC (OHCHR, 1989) itself marginalises younger children by predicating children’s access to their rights on the notion of ‘evolving capacities’ (Lansdown, 2005; Van Beers, Invernizzi and Milne, 2008, p. 54), rather than seeing children from birth as competent social actors (Dahlberg and Lenz Taguchi, 1994, p. 2; Prout and James, 1997) and infants and children up to 8 years as ‘important people who have rights and are important human beings capable of understanding, communicating and influencing (their) own lives and those around (them)’ (Harcourt, Perry and Waller, 2011: 7). Indeed, GC7 acknowledges ‘young children as social actors from the beginning of life’ (OHCHR, 2006, p. 2). Yet over a decade after its publication, GC7 (OHCHR, 2006) remains an addendum to UNCRC (OHCHR, 1989); the original convention has not yet been reframed to acknowledge fully the capacities of the youngest children, the world citizens who are experiencing the most critical period of their lives.

As a result of obscurity in policy and practice across the world, the rights of many infants and young children are not respected, so that they are denied play opportunities, a standard of living that meets their physical and social needs, or protection from sexual abuse and violence. This international handbook is concerned with the ways rights of infants and young children up to 8 years translate from policy into practice. The book captures and critiques much of what has been achieved to date in realising the rights of infants and children up to 8 years, critically reviews the current state of rights for those children, and considers what remains to be done to secure and respect the rights of infants and young children younger than 8 years in particular. To achieve these aims, the handbook draws on international perspectives characterised by empirical research evidence, praxis and expertise across multiple disciplines. This chapter begins that journey by setting in context the rights of infants and children younger than 8 years. We consider children’s rights generally, reflecting on their history and definition and considering some of the problems concerning them, before outlining the handbook’s organisation and content.

A short history of children’s rights

Following World War I, Eglantyne Jebb co-founded the Save the Children Fund (SCF) in 1919 and subsequently co-wrote the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, endorsed by the League of Nations in 1924 (Mahood, 2008; Milne, 2008). The 1924 Declaration ‘recognised and affirmed for the first time the existence of rights specific to children’ (Humanium, 2011), with a primary focus on protection and provision, and small consideration of participation as ‘rights-in-trust’ (Archard, 2011).

International focus on human rights intensified after World War II, signalled in 1945 by the transformation of the League of Nations into the United Nations (United Nations, 2000). Between 1945 and 1949, Nazi collaborators were tried at the Nuremberg Trials, resulting in the Nuremberg Code (United States Government, 1949). While the Nuremberg Trials were in session, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights emerged, framing ‘childhood’ as a phase when children are ‘entitled to special care and assistance’ (United Nations, 1948). The second Declaration of the Rights of the Child emerged from the United Nations General Assembly in 1959: this focused predominantly on protection, ‘with little emphasis on empowering (children) as well’ (Humanium, 2011; UNICEF, 2009). This was not a legally binding document, but three decades later, on 20 November 1989, the UNCRC was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly as a legal agreement (OHCHR, 1989). However, few of its authors were practising lawyers and few ‘knew much about the real situation of children in any country including their own’ (Milne, 2008, p. 51): they were an eclectic and elite group of UN diplomats, most of whom were based in Geneva or New York. Shortly after the UNCRC was adopted, it was ratified by all but two United Nations member states, the United States of America and Somalia (Gordon, Irving, Nandy and Townsend, 2007); Somalia ratified the UNCRC in 2015.

Like the UNCRC, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC) is a comprehensive instrument that sets out rights and defines universal principles and norms for the status of children. The ACRWC was adopted by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1990 and was entered into force in 1999. The ACRWC calls for the creation of an African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (Committee of Experts), and its mission is to interpret, promote, protect and practise applying the rights established by the ACRWC. This allows for important cultural distinctions (e.g. a more communitarian approach for the African continent). The ACRWC and the UNCRC are the only international and regional human rights treaties that cover the whole spectrum of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.

Many consider the UNCRC (OHCHR, 1989) to have made a strong and positive contribution to children’s rights internationally (Franklin, 1995; Milne, 2008; Reid, 1994). However, this is by no means a universal view (Byrne and Lundy, 2015), and in regard to younger children there seem to be particular challenges in translating policy into practice (McGrath et al., 2008; Te One, 2010).

The nature of rights

Feinberg (1970) proposes that ‘a claim against someone whose recognition as valid is called for by some set of governing rules or moral principles’ (p. 257); rights may be those rules or principles. Human rights are defined as ‘basic rights and freedoms that all people are entitled to regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, race, religion, language, or other status’ (Amnesty International, 2011). A right affords ‘power, prerogative and privilege’ (Hohfeld, 1920, pp. 36–37). Rights may be framed as sets of ‘jural opposites’, for which they are juxtaposed with no rights – privilege/duty, power/disability, immunity/liability – or sets of ‘jural correlates’, for which they are associated with duties – privilege/no rights, power/liability, immunity/disability (Hohfeld, 1920, pp. 36–37). This construct creates tensions (e.g. between ‘rights and duties’ for which claim rights and liberty rights are given primacy over power rights and immunity rights) (Wilson, 2007). Any suggestion that claim rights should balance rights with responsibilities ‘should be uncontroversial’ (Ife and Fiske, 2006, p. 297), but claim rights may have a more pragmatic quality than liberty rights – ‘rights of individuals to pursue their own lives without interference’ (Jones and Welch, 2010, pp. 30–31) – because they acknowledge limitations that social contexts may impose.

Moral rights are so important that it would be ‘wrong to deny it or to withhold’ them (MacCormick, 1982, p. 160); Archard (2004) distinguishes between moral rights and legal rights, but suggests that a single right might be both. Equally, different types of rights tend to assume negative or positive connotations. Rights requiring protection may be regarded as ‘negative rights’, whereas positive rights are considered ‘legal, institutional, customary’ rights and fundamental rights, including liberty, self-determination, and freedom of thought, expression, religion or movement, and as such are viewed as ‘moral, natural, human’ rights (Archard, 2004; O’Neill, 1988, p. 445; Symonides, 2000). Welfare or provision rights are also regarded as positive rights, and may include rights to shelter, health, medicine, food and personal autonomy (Archard, 2011; Eddy, 2006; Griffin, 2000). However, there may be a finite supply of welfare rights so that they cannot be guaranteed for everyone, so it may be argued that a more apposite term for these is ‘ethical rights’ (Eddy, 2006; Griffin, 2000, p. 30).

While ‘all people are entitled to … basic rights’ (Amnesty International, 2011), another way of categorising rights is predicated on age: adults’ rights (‘A Rights’), children’s rights (‘C Rights’) and rights that both groups share (‘A-C Rights’) (Feinberg, 1980). Two types of ‘C Rights’ focus on ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ (Qvortrup, 1994): rights to goods such as food, shelter, love and freedom from harm and ‘rights to an open future’ (e.g. education) (Archard, 2011; Feinberg, 1980). However, ‘C Rights’ carry tensions: for example, when a child is positioned as a passive recipient of protection rights, other rights may be compromised (e.g. rights to liberty or freedom of expression and movement).

The nature of children’s rights

The UNCRC (OHCHR, 1989) asserts that ‘childhood is entitled to special care and assistance’, and to that end the Convention incorporates social, cultural, political, civil and economic rights in its 54 articles, to which every child has an entitlement. While all 54 articles are considered equally important and interwoven, four rights are articulated in the Convention’s General Principles: these are children’s rights that also facilitate the other UNCRC rights (UNICEF, 2018b). The four General Principles are concerned with a child’s rights to non-discrimination (Article 2), primacy afforded to his or her best interests (Article 3), life, survival and optimal development (Article 6) and being heard (Article 12) (OHCHR, 1989). Alongside the General Principles, other rights are divided into three groups: survival and development rights, sometimes termed protection rights, provision rights, and participation rights; these three groups of children’s rights are widely referred to as the ‘three Ps’ (Bardy, 2000). There is some overl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Author biographies
• Foreword
• PART 1: Policy affecting young children’s rights
• PART 2 Young children’s rights to protection
• PART 3 Young children’s rights to provision
• PART 4 Young children’s rights to participation
• Index