Campaigning for Children

Strategies for Advancing Children's Rights

Jo Becker

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503603042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Advocates within the growing field of children's rights have designed dynamic campaigns to protect and promote children's rights. This expanding body of international law and jurisprudence, however, lacks a core text that provides an up-to-date look at current children's rights issues, the evolution of children's rights law, and the efficacy of efforts to protect children.

Campaigning for Children focuses on contemporary children's rights, identifying the range of abuses that affect children today, including early marriage, female genital mutilation, child labor, child sex tourism, corporal punishment, the impact of armed conflict, and access to education. Jo Becker traces the last 25 years of the children's rights movement, including the evolution of international laws and standards to protect children from abuse and exploitation. From a practitioner's perspective, Becker provides readers with careful case studies of the organizations and campaigns that are making a difference in the lives of children, and the relevant strategies that have been successful—or not. By presenting a variety of approaches to deal with each issue, this book carefully teases out broader lessons for effective social change in the field of children's rights.

1

From Property to People

The Evolution of Children’s Rights

EGLANTYNE JEBB was an unlikely champion for children. She never had children of her own and didn’t even particularly like them. “I don’t care for children . . . the little wretches,” she once wrote.¹ Early in her career, she spent a year as a schoolteacher, but quickly realized she was ill suited for the job. In her diary, she wrote that she would prefer to go to the dentist than spend a day in the classroom.

Jebb was born in 1876 in Shropshire, England, and grew up on her well-to-do family’s estate. After her ill-fated attempt at teaching, she became involved in charity work in Cambridge, but it was World War I that transformed her into an international children’s advocate. During the war, a British economic blockade contributed to unprecedented deprivation across Central and Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people starved to death, and rates of infant and child mortality were appallingly high. While British propaganda minimized the level of suffering, Jebb worked to expose the humanitarian crisis and build support for an end to the blockade. In 1919, she was arrested in London’s Trafalgar Square for distributing pamphlets depicting starving children in Austria. She also began an emergency relief fund to mobilize shipments of food and medicine for children affected by the blockade in Austria and Germany. This initiative became Save the Children, the international children’s development organization that today works in 120 countries.²

Jebb became convinced that protecting the rights of children was essential to creating a better world order. “Every generation of children . . . offers mankind anew the possibility of rebuilding his ruin of a world,” she said.³ In 1922, she drafted a five-point Charter for Children that stated in part: “The child that is hungry must be fed; the child that is sick must be nursed; the child that is backward must be helped; the delinquent child must be reclaimed; and the orphan and waif must be sheltered and succoured.”⁴ Jebb took the charter to Geneva. In 1924, the League of Nations adopted it as the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, the first international statement of children’s rights.

The concept of children’s rights is relatively recent. For most of history, children were seen as the property of their parents or, at best, a vulnerable group in need of special care. Children were primarily valued for their labor and ability to contribute to their family’s livelihood and survival. Nonetheless, children found ways to exercise their rights. In 1889, for example, children in England went on strike for better education,⁵ and in 1903, striking child textile workers marched with Mother Jones from Pennsylvania to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York to protest child labor.⁶ From the 1970s, thousands of child protesters were at the forefront of South Africa’s antiapartheid movement. Yet only in the last few decades have children been recognized as individuals with their own rights, including the right to speak out and participate in decisions that affect their lives.

The first formal legal protections for children emerged in nineteenth-century Europe as a reaction to the grueling and hazardous working conditions that many children endured. Children had long worked alongside their family members on farms or in family enterprises, but with the industrial revolution, many began working in factories. Children as young as five or six years old labored for twelve to sixteen hours a day in deplorable conditions, receiving little pay and subjected to harsh punishment. Social reformers began to advocate for legal restrictions, and for the first time in Europe, laws were enacted governing child labor. Reformers also established orphanages for abandoned and destitute children and reformatories or “industrial schools” for children found begging or engaged in theft. The purpose of these institutions was not necessarily to nurture the child, but to instill obedience and industriousness and to protect the child from negative influences.

The unprecedented suffering of children during World War I brought new attention to the vulnerabilities of children in the midst of disaster. The Declaration on the Rights of the Child, penned by Eglantyne Jebb and adopted in the wake of the war, was reaffirmed by the League of Nations in 1934. Heads of state pledged to incorporate it into national legislation, and in France, authorities ordered every school to display the text.⁷

In 1948, following World War II, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which for the first time set out fundamental human rights that apply to all people, including the right to life, liberty, dignity, nondiscrimination, freedom of expression, education, employment, an adequate standard of living, and freedom from torture and slavery. It gave special recognition to children as “entitled to special care and assistance.”⁸ In 1959, the United Nations adopted a new Declaration of the Rights of the Child, outlining ten nonbinding principles. It expanded on the 1924 declaration by recognizing children’s right to nondiscrimination; a name and nationality; free education; and protection from all forms of neglect, cruelty, and exploitation.

Beginning in the 1960s, members of the United Nations negotiated legally binding treaties to elaborate the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1966, the United Nations adopted two parallel treaties: the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (together known as the International Bill of Human Rights). These treaties include provisions specifically focused on children, including their right to a name and nationality, education, protection from economic and social exploitation (including hazardous work), and special procedures for children accused of criminal offenses that take their age into account. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (adopted in 1979) addresses child marriage, stating that the betrothal and marriage of a child will not be legally recognized. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (adopted in 2006) affirms the rights of children with disabilities to inclusive education and other rights without discrimination.

In 1978, the government of Poland proposed the first legally binding convention devoted solely to children’s rights, inspired by a Polish hero, Janusz Korczak. Korczak was a pediatrician and educator, and regarded by many as the father of children’s rights. In 1911, he began an orphanage for Jewish children in Warsaw called Dom Sierot, which he directed for over thirty years. He helped the children of the orphanage create their own parliament and, in 1926, their own newspaper, Maly Przeglad (Little Review). He published books advocating for the rights of children and expressed his views on a regular radio program. He wrote of children as “a diminutive nation” that “had been forgotten in the great historical transformations from the struggle for the abolition of slavery to the struggle for equal rights for women.”⁹ In 1942, the Nazis came to the orphanage and collected over 190 children to transport to the Treblinka concentration camp. Korczak was reportedly offered sanctuary but refused to abandon the children. He and the children perished at Treblinka.

In proposing a children’s convention, Poland hoped to honor and popularize Koczak’s concepts of childhood. It submitted an initial draft to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1978 and a second draft a year later. This draft included the first provision recognizing a child’s right to influence his or her own life, noting that the child “who is capable of forming his own views [has] the right to express his opinion in matters concerning his own person.”¹⁰

Negotiations on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) lasted ten years and were shaped significantly by the dynamics of the Cold War. Eastern bloc countries focused on economic, social, and cultural rights, including the right of children to health, social security, and education. Western bloc countries focused more on civil and political rights. The United States participated actively in the negotiations during the Reagan administration and proposed seven new articles, more than any other country. These included articles guaranteeing children’s rights to freedom of expression (article 13), freedom of religion (article 14), freedom of association and assembly (article 15), and the right to privacy (article 16).

Some nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists viewed the US role with suspicion, including Cynthia Price Cohen, an American lawyer and advocate who was intensely involved in the negotiations. She speculated that the US proposals to protect the civil rights of children “were inspired more by the desire to irritate the Soviet Union than from any grand philosophy regarding children’s rights.”¹¹ In fact, during the negotiations, a US representative stated that the United States had no intention of ratifying the convention but was participating in the negotiations to help create a “better convention” for other countries.¹²

Nongovernmental organizations played an unprecedented role in shaping the convention. Thirty NGOs formed the Ad Hoc Group on the Drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the group proposed recommendations for the text before every session. According to Price Cohen, the group provided “a crucial buffer” between the East and the West. When negotiations bogged down between the two blocs, the NGO text often emerged as the basis for continued negotiations.¹³ NGO representatives also participated in working groups of government representatives assigned to work on specific provisions.

One of the most contentious issues was the definition of child. Some delegations insisted that the child’s rights came into being from the moment of conception, while others claimed that they began after birth. The final text sidestepped the issue by defining a child as “every human being below the age of eighteen years, unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.”¹⁴

Governments also split over the issue of children’s participation in armed conflict. The United States advocated that the minimum age for military recruitment and participation in hostilities should be 15, in line with existing laws of war.¹⁵ Many other governments advocated for the age of 18, consistent with the standard used for all of the convention’s other articles. The United States, which routinely deployed 17-year-old soldiers into combat, refused to budge. Because every article was adopted by consensus, the lower age prevailed despite other countries’ objections.

The final text of the convention, adopted in 1989, combines economic, social, and cultural rights with civil and political rights—one of the first international treaties to do so. It affirms the child’s right to education, social security, and the highest standard of health, as well as freedom of expression, religion, and association. It emphasizes four key principles: nondiscrimination; the best interests of the child; the right to life, survival, and development; and respect for the child’s views. It prohibits violence and neglect, sexual and economic exploitation, and capital punishment, and it outlines standards for juvenile justice, adoption, and the treatment of children separated from their families, among other issues.¹⁶

The CRC was the first international agreement that treated children as rights holders rather than passive objects of care and protection—a significant shift. It affirms the child’s right to express his or her own views, including in judicial and legal proceedings that might affect the child, and states that those views will be given “due weight” in accordance with the child’s age and maturity.¹⁷ The article guaranteeing freedom of expression also specifies that the child has the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds . . . through any media of the child’s choice.”¹⁸

The CRC became the most widely ratified treaty in history, with 196 states that ratified it (known as “states parties”). By 2017, only one country, the United States, had failed to ratify the convention. Opposition to US ratification originated with conservative organizations that insisted that the convention would have a detrimental impact on American families. They believed that upholding the rights of the child, as articulated in the convention, would undermine the rights of parents to raise and discipline their children.¹⁹ (In reality, at least nineteen of the convention’s substantive articles give special deference to the parent-child relationship.) The United States signed the convention in 1995, but as of 2017, no administration had submitted it to the Senate for ratification.

In 2000, the UN General Assembly adopted two optional protocols to the CRC. One addressed its anomaly regarding children’s involvement in armed conflict, raising to 18 the minimum age for conscription or direct participation in armed conflict and prohibiting any recruitment of children under the age of 18 by nonstate armed groups.²⁰ The second optional protocol dealt with the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography.²¹ These instruments were also widely accepted: by 2017, each had been ratified by more than 160 countries. In 2011, the General Assembly adopted a third optional protocol, allowing children to bring individual complaints to the Committee on the Rights of the Child when states have violated or failed to protect their rights and when domestic remedies have been exhausted.²²

The CRC established a committee of eighteen independent experts, known as the Committee on the Rights of the Child, to assess implementation of the treaty by individual countries. The UN General Assembly elects the members of the committee, wh...