Children's rights movement

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The children's rights movement is a historical and modern movement committed to the acknowledgment, expansion, and/or regression of the rights of children around the world. While the historical definition of child has varied, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child explains, "A child is any human being below the age of eighteen years, unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier."[1] Cornell University reports that a child is a person, not a subperson, and the parent has absolute interest and possession of the child. The term "child" does not necessarily mean minor but can include adult children as well as adult nondependent children.[2] There are no definitions of other terms used to describe young people such as "adolescents", "teenagers" or "youth" in international law.[3]

Contents

[edit] History

Youth activists in the United States in the late 1800s.
Youth activists in the United States in the late 1800s.
Further information: Child labor

Thomas Spence's The Rights of Infants (1796) is an early English-language assertion of the natural rights of children.

In the USA, the children's rights movement was born in the 1800s with the orphan train. In the big cities, when a child's parents died, the child frequently had to go to work to support him or herself. Boys generally became factory or coal workers, and girls became prostitutes or saloon girls, or else went to work in a sweat shop. All of these jobs paid only starvation wages.

In 1852, Massachusetts required children to attend school. In 1853, Charles Brace founded the Children's Aid Society, which worked hard to take street children in. The following year, the children were placed on a train headed for the West, where they were adopted, and often given work. By 1929, the orphan train had stopped running altogether, but its principles lived on.

The National Child Labor Committee, an organization dedicated to the abolition of all child labor, was formed in the 1890s. It managed to pass one law, which was struck down by the Supreme Court two years later for violating a child's right to contract his work. In 1924, Congress attempted to pass a constitutional amendment that would authorize a national child labor law. This measure was blocked, and the bill was eventually dropped. It took the Great Depression to end child labor nationwide; adults had become so desperate for jobs that they would work for the same wage as children. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act which, amongst other things, placed limits on many forms of child labor.

Now that child labor had been effectively eradicated, the movement turned to other things, but it again stalled when World War II broke out and children and women began to enter the work force once more. With millions of adults at war, the children were needed to help keep the country running. In Europe, children served as couriers, intelligence collectors, and other underground resistance workers in opposition to Hitler's regime.

It should be noted the child labour was also wiped out in Europe and not just America, one such an act in America did not affect those of Europe. This act was a follow on from a similar one in some countries of Europe previously.

[edit] Present

In the early twentieth century, moves began to promote the idea of children's rights as distinct from those of adults and as requiring explicit recognition. The Polish educationalist Janusz Korczak wrote of the rights of children in his book How to Love a Child (Warsaw, 1919); a later book was entitled The Child's Right to Respect (Warsaw, 1929). In 1917, following the Russian Revolution, the Moscow branch of the organisation Proletkult produced a Declaration of Children's Rights.[4] However, the first effective attempt to promote children's rights was the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, drafted by Eglantyne Jebb in 1923 and adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. This was accepted by the United Nations on its formation and updated in 1959, and replaced with a more extensive UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.

From the formation of the United Nations in the 1940s and extending to present day, the children's rights movement has become global in focus. While the situation of children in the United States has become grave, children around the world have increasingly become engaged in illegal, forced child labor, genital mutilation, military service, and sex trafficking. Several international organizations have rallied to the assistance of children. They include Save the Children, Free the Children, and the Children's Defense Fund.

The Child Rights Information Network, or CRIN, formed in 1983, is the group of 1,600 non-governmental organizations from around the world which advocate for the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Organization's report on their countries' progress towards implementation, as do governments that have ratified the Convention. Every 5 years reporting to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child is required for governments.

[edit] United States

Main article: Timeline of children's rights in the United States

While there is a long history of children's rights in the U.S., scholars contend that there is no "golden age".[5] Many children's rights advocates in the U.S. today advocate for a smaller agenda than their international peers. Groups predominately focus on child abuse and neglect, child fatalities, foster care, youth aging out of foster care, preventing foster care placement, and adoption.[6] A longstanding movement promoting youth rights in the United States has made substantial gains in the past.

[edit] Ombudsmanship

Several countries have created an institute of children's rights ombudsman, most notably Sweden, Finland and Ukraine, which is first country worldwide to install children at that post. In Ukraine Ivan Cherevko and Julia Kruk became first children's rights ombudsmen in late 2005.

[edit] Criticism

While the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has outlined a standard premise for the children's rights movement that 192 countries have ratified, the United States has not done so, and therefore there is no universal international standard which all children or adults adhere to. The CRC has been ratified by all but two nations; the United States and Somalia; many that have ratified nevertheless have failed to operate by its parameters.[citation needed] Likewise, there is an international movement to refocus the child rights dialog towards expanding the rights of children, towards voting and full civic membership and participation. Somalia's inability to sign the Convention is attributed to their lack of governmental structure. The current US administration has opposed ratifying the Convention because of "serious political and legal concerns that it conflicts with U.S. policies on the central role of parents, sovereignty, and state and local law."[7] The U.S. Representative to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women claimed in 2004 that "The CRC... represents an international attempt to ensure children’s well being... However, the Convention then veers off by granting – not protective rights for children – but autonomy rights that may actually harm rather than strengthen the child.”[8]

Groups that oppose U.S. Ratification of the CRC include: the Christian Coalition; Concerned Women for America; Family Research Council; Focus on the Family; Home School Legal Defense Association; and the National Center for Home Education. Groups that support ratification include World Vision,[9] Church World Service,[10] the Baha'is of the United States[11], the Children's Rights Council,[12]Church Women United[13], and the USA National Council of Churches.[14]

The Centre for Cultural Renewal, a Canadian think-tank, has argued that the effect of the Convention is to shift the balance of the law away from the rights of parents and the family.[15][16]

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ (1989) "Convention on the Rights of the Child", United Nations. Retrieved 2/23/08.
  2. ^ "Children's Rights", Cornell University Law School. Retrieved 2/23/08.
  3. ^ "Children and youth", Human Rights Education Association. Retrieved 2/23/08.
  4. ^ Mally, Lynn (1990). Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia (in English). Berkeley: University of California Press, p.180. Retrieved on 2007-09-21. “The Moscow Proletkult even passed a "Declaration of Children's Rights," which guaranteed that children could pick their own form of education, their own religion, and could even leave their parents if they chose” 
  5. ^ Guggenheim, M. (2005) What's wrong with children's rights. Harvard University Press. p 1.
  6. ^ Children's Rights organizational website. Retrieved 2/28/08.
  7. ^ Report by the Secretary of State to the Congress. October 2003, Part 2.
  8. ^ Ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey to the World Congress of Families III, Mexico City, Mexico, on March 29, 2004
  9. ^ World Vision, Here we stand: World Vision and child rights (2nd edition), 17 Dec 2007
  10. ^ "Children just need a chance."
  11. ^ National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States
  12. ^ Children's Rights Council: History and Accomplishments
  13. ^ Church Women United
  14. ^ National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, Resolution on the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
  15. ^ Simon Coleman, Leslie Carlin, The Cultures of Creationism: Anti-evolutionism in English-speaking Countries, page 88.
  16. ^ Silver, C. (2006) Protecting Parental Liberty in a Child-Centered Legal System.

[edit] References

  • Joseph M. Hawes, The Children's Rights Movement: A History of Advocacy and Protection (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991). ISBN 0-8057-9748-3

[edit] External links

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