Handbook of Children’s Rights

Global and Multidisciplinary Perspectives

While the notion of young people as individuals worthy or capable of having rights is of relatively recent origin, over the past several decades there has been a substantial increase in both social and political commitment to children’s rights as well as a tendency to grant young people some of the rights that were typically accorded only to adults. In addition, there has been a noticeable shift in orientation from a focus on children’s protection and provision to an emphasis on children’s participation and self-determination.

With contributions from a wide range of international scholars, the Handbook of Children’s Rights brings together research, theory, and practice from diverse perspectives on children’s rights. This volume constitutes a comprehensive treatment of critical perspectives concerning children’s rights in their various forms. Its contributions address some of the major scholarly tensions and policy debates comprising the current discourse on children’s rights, including the best interests of the child, evolving capacities of the child, states’ rights versus children’s rights, rights of children versus parental or family rights, children as citizens, children’s rights versus children’s responsibilities, and balancing protection and participation. In addition to its multidisciplinary focus, the handbook includes perspectives from social science domains in which children’s rights scholarship has evolved largely independently due to distinct and seemingly competing assumptions and disciplinary approaches (e.g., childhood studies, developmental psychology, sociology of childhood, anthropology, and political science). The handbook also brings together diverse methodological approaches to the study of children’s rights, including both quantitative and qualitative perspectives, and policy analysis.

This comprehensive, cosmopolitan, and timely volume serves as an important reference for both scholarly and policy-driven interest in the voices and perspectives of children and youth.

Children’s Rights

Today’s Global Challenge

This accessible and authoritative book provides the first systematic overview of the global children’s rights movement. It introduces students, children’s advocates, and scholars to child and youth rights in all their theoretical, historical, cultural, political, and practical complexity. In the process, it examines key controversies about globalization, cultural relativism, social justice, power, economics, politics, freedom, ageism, and more.

Combining vivid examples with cutting-edge research, Children’s Rights: Today’s Global Challenge lifts up the rights of the youngest third of humanity as the major human rights challenge of the twenty-first century.

Rethinking Children’s Rights

Attitudes in Contemporary Society

This book explores attitudes towards and experiences of children’s rights. Phil Jones and Sue Welch draw on a wide range of thought, research and practice from different fields and countries to debate, challenge and re-appraise long held beliefs, attitudes and ways of working and living with children. Children’s own perspectives on their lives and on adults’ attitudes towards them are drawn on throughout the book.

Recent developments in the definition of rights are considered from a variety of perspectives and arenas of children’s lives and the future impact of these changes on children’s lives, and for those who feature in children’s lives, are examined. The themes discussed include power relations between adults and children, the child’s voice, intercultural perspectives, social justice, social exclusion, empowerment, gender and disability.

Examples of research, reflections on research, activities, key points and guidance on further reading make this a really accessible text.

Rethinking Children’s Rights is essential for those studying childhood at undergraduate and graduate level, and of great interest to those working with children in any field.

Assessment Tool for Migrant and Refugee Children

This paper examines a range of tools, guidelines and formats available to monitor and evaluate various aspects of national responses to migrant children and argues for the need to integrate them into a single coherent, child focused, rights-based framework. Their current disparate application leaves gaps in the child’s protective environment and is not consistent with a holistic, child rights-based approach. Building on an analytical framework adopted by the Council of Europe in March 2018 to support a child-rights based approach by local and regional authorities to migrant and asylum-seeking children, the paper puts forward for consideration an integrated evaluation framework that incorporates and links existing practice models in order to ensure quality child-centred monitoring at each and every stage of the migration process.

Our Children Our Future

A baseline study on psychosocial support of orphans and vulnerable children in two villages in Botswana

This report provides a baseline study on psychosocial support of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) in two villages in Botswana and forms part of a series of reports that examine the work undertaken as part of the Kellogg OVC Intervention Project from 2002 to 2005.The general aim of the project is to assist families and households to better cope with the increased burden of care for OVC. The purpose of this particular baseline psychosocial survey (PSS) was to gather data to facilitate the introduction and evaluation of the effectiveness of orphan care intervention programmes for strengthening community participation and empowerment of OVC in two villages in Botswana. This information will be used in evaluating the effectiveness of the new OVC interventions that will be implemented in the two villages in Botswana as part of the overall OVC project.

In 2002, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) was commissioned by the WK Kellogg Foundation to develop and implement a five-year intervention project focusing on orphans and vulnerable children OVC in southern Africa. In collaboration with several partner organisations, the project currently focuses on how children, families and communities in Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe are coping with the impact of HIV/AIDS. The aim of the project is to develop models of best practice so as to enhance and improve support structures for OVC in the southern African region as a whole.

Monitoring Child Well-Being

Practical and user-friendly, this volume provides an evidence and rights-based approach to monitoring the well-being of children and adolescents in South Africa. Drawing on international precedents, and extensive peer review processes, experts in various fields have developed this holistic set of indicators to enhance the monitoring of the status of children.

Taking ideological cues from the child-rights focus of the South African Constitution, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of Children, the authors evaluate the state of children, which is important to measure, within the contexts within which they grow and develop. The indicators therefore measure both the service environment and the childrens developmental contexts.

The book has two main parts. Part I provides the conceptual underpinnings that inform the development of the rights-based approach to monitoring child well-being over a range of domains including:

Child poverty and the quality of childrens neighbourhoods and home environments
Child health, HIV and AIDS, mental health and disability
Early child development and education
Child protection, children in statutory care, children in the justice system, children on the streets and children affected by the worst forms of labour.

Part II contains comprehensive tables of indicators for the domains covered in Part I, with recommended measurement and data sources. Where appropriate, the indicators are rights-based and aligned to current policy.

Do African Children Have Rights?

Children are the most politically powerless citizens of all nations. Infants and young children, especially, are the most vulnerable. The United Nations 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) constitutes a landmark in the development of international human rights law and reflects an historic turn in universal thinking about children and their rights. It is almost universally embraced, with more ratifications than any other human rights treaty in history. Africa is one of the continents in the world where the rights of the child are still a mirage; a continent where half of the population is made up of children. But the sad reality for many of these children is that violation of their rights is not seen as a serious problem. These violations, in most cases, have severe consequences for children even beyond their childhood, thus posing direct threats to peace, stability and development in Africa.

This miserable state of affairs spells disaster. It foretells a future of uneducated, undernourished and unhealthy workers who, far from being the foundation and building blocks of a modern, dynamic economy, will perpetuate the continent’s poverty and lack of development. Today’s social and economic crises have radically changed the world views and the life expectations of the African child. Many of the children in Africa face the future with a deep sense of uncertainty and foreboding, and the issue of child trafficking and child labour reflects a profound crisis of the family. This book is an attempt to respond to the numerous questions that could be asked: To what extent have the provisions of the CRC been implemented in the national legislations of African States? What effect have they had on children in Africa? How has the ratification of the CRC been able to meliorate the lives of millions of children in Africa? What mechanisms exist to prevent and sanction rights abusers? Have these rights had any impact on the lives of Africans? In other words, is there any difference between the reality and rhetoric of rights? The best gift humanity could give to the world is to ensure a safe, healthy, educated and able future generation.

Young Children’s Rights

Published in association with Save the Children Priscilla Alderson examines the often overlooked issue of the rights of young children, starting with the question of how the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child applies to the youngest children, from birth to eight years of age. The question of finding a balance between young children’s rights to protection, to provision (resources and services) and to participation (expressing their views, being responsible) is discussed. The author suggests that, in the belief we are looking after their best interests, we have become overprotective of children and deny them the freedom to be expressive, creative and active, and that improving the way adults and children communicate is the best way of redressing that balance. This second edition has been updated and expanded to include the relevance of UNCRC rights of premature babies, international examples such as the Chinese one-child policy, children’s influence on regional policies, and the influence on young children’s lives of policies such as Every Child Matters and those of the World Bank, IMF, OECD and UNICEF. This readable, informative and thought-provoking book is a compelling invitation to rethink our attitudes to young children’s rights in the light of new theories, research and practical evidence about children’s daily lives. It will be of interest to anyone who works with young children.

The Human Rights of Children

From Visions to Implementation

This volume provides a series of critical analyses of some of the contemporary debates in relation to the human rights of children, resituating them within visions which informed the text of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The studies embrace examination of some of today’s widespread interpretations of the CRC, analysis of what is implied by a human rights-based approach in research and advocacy and consideration of advances and barriers to research and to several aspects of CRC implementation. With contributions by leading experts in the field, the book examines the CRC as an international instrument, its inherent dilemmas and some of the debates generated by the challenges of implementation. It embraces examinations of different levels of governance from the international to the state party, regional and local levels, including institutional developments and changes in law, policy and practice. The book will be a valuable resource for students, researchers and policy-makers working in the area of children’s rights and welfare.

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child

Taking Stock after 25 Years and Looking Ahead

In 2014 the world’s most widely ratified human rights treaty, one specifically for children, reached the milestone of its twenty-fifth anniversary. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in the time since then it has entered a new century, reshaping laws, policies, institutions and practices across the globe, along with fundamental conceptions of who children are, their rights and entitlements, and society’s duties and obligations to them.

Yet despite its rapid entry into force worldwide, there are concerns that the Convention remains a high-level paper treaty without the traction on the ground needed to address ever-continuing violations of children’s rights. This book, based on papers from the conference ‘25 Years CRC’ held by the Department of Child Law at Leiden University, draws together a rich collection of research and insight by academics, practitioners, NGOs and other specialists to reflect on the lessons of the past 25 years, take stock of how international rights find their way into children’s lives at the local level, and explore the frontiers of children’s rights for the 25 years ahead.