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UK OPINION
We are living in an era of child-panic. Why not give
those who are the object of this anxiety a say in their own future?
Don't confuse children's rights with
pester power: they are coming of age
To suggest that there is such a thing as "childism" is
to risk ridicule. The notion of children's rights is inevitably greeted
with hostility in a political climate where young people are most often
maligned for their lack of respect for the rights of others. But lately,
as the government's authoritarian stance on childhood proves unworkable
and, in some cases, fatal, while public opinion shifts significantly on
the treatment of children within the home, there is a change in the mood
music. Could children's rights finally be coming of age?
There has been a dramatic surge in parliamentary
support for a smacking ban, with a record 170 MPs supporting Greg Pope
MP's motion to grant children the same legal protection from assault as
adults, reflecting the turnaround in public attitudes over the past
generation.
Meanwhile, a number of prominent peers are supporting
amendments to the Police and Justice bill, currently in the Lords, to
reinstate reporting restrictions for children subject to Asbo
proceedings and to end penal custody for children. The latter is given
particular resonance following the findings of last week's inquiry into
the murder of Zahid Mubarek, which stated categorically that we lock up
too many children.
And the Children's Rights Alliance for England is
campaigning for pupils to have the right to have their views considered
in matters affecting the everyday running of their schools included in
the Education bill, which would give English children entitlements that
their Scottish peers have enjoyed since 2000.
So will we soon be witness to latter-day child
Chartists marching for suffrage with Smarties? It's not difficult to
make the case that children's rights are poorly served in the UK.
Children can, by law, be assaulted by their parents if it meets the
requirement of "reasonable chastisement". A young offender can be tried
in an adult court and named and shamed in newspapers, in direct
contravention of their internationally recognised human rights.
Although the government has committed itself to the
elimination of child poverty, the numbers of children growing up without
warm beds or hot meals remains unacceptable. And adults could be argued
to be depriving children, and their children's children, of the right to
a future, as they leave them with a planet on the brink of environmental
collapse.
Meanwhile, across the globe, children are proving
themselves to be thoroughly competent. Ten-year-olds head households in
war-torn Africa. Child labourers unionise in India. Because children can
doesn't always mean children should. But ordinary children in
extraordinary circumstances are continually revealing capabilities that
remain unexplored in their more fortunate peers. The possibilities
offered by a rights-based approach need not deprive children of their
childhoods nor dissolve into a reductio ad absurdum of votes for
toddlers.
But it makes for a poor fit with New Labour's
construction of child citizenship, which could be characterised as
requiring social conformity in the present and employability in the
future. Indeed, many adults think that children already have too many
rights, perhaps because they confuse rights with pester-power. But
acquiring designer clothes or state-of-the-art technology is not the
same as having rights. Adults fear that "rights" means children refusing
to go to bed at a reasonable hour, demanding extortionate pocket money,
and divorcing their parents if they don't give them what they want.
This misunderstands how children's rights might
operate in practice.
Children's citizenship is different from that of
adults. Of course parents and the state are often best-placed to make
decisions for children. But the fear that rights will create a
generation of mini militants grabbing what they can from the diminishing
pot of adult power, is based on a fundamental misconception about what
growing up is really like. It suggests that childhood is a time free of
challenge or difficulty, when rights are unnecessary and would only be
used for petty personal gain.
It follows that children's rights cannot be exercised
in isolation. Their rights to provision, protection and participation,
laid out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, must be
balanced with adults' responsibility to facilitate them, and children's
own responsibility to exercise those rights with consideration for
others. Children's rights need not be an affront to adult authority.
Bertrand Russell said that "no political theory is
adequate unless it is applicable to children as well as to men and
women". But it is a far more paternalistic tradition that has prevailed
in modern times. In some ways, it's akin to how women's and ethnic
minorities' rights — or lack of them — were framed. Indeed, it's been
argued that children are now in the position once occupied by the
idealised bourgeois wife and mother, as historian Harry Hendrick puts
it, "pampered and loved, an essential ornament serving as testimony to
domestic bliss, but subservient to male power."
We are living in an era of child-panic, when concerns
about children's wellbeing have become all-consuming. Childhood has
become the crucible for every adult anxiety — sex, technology,
consumerism, safety, achievement, respect, the proper shape of a life.
Of course adults worry about children. Changes in how childhood is lived
attack at the deepest level our sense of personal history and our ideas
of what make us human. The work of raising children is love and
life-enhancing, but also difficult, and poorly supported.
But if we are to reach a consensus on the kinds of
morals, ambitions and characters we want our children to have, then we
need to return to a notion of common citizenship. It's time to rebel
against the modern absolute of individualism. Parenting cannot happen in
isolation. As the saying goes, it takes a village. It takes a country.
And it also takes a recognition that children themselves can play a part
in their development.
Granting young people a more central role in society
is not a panacea for the multitude of challenges that attend
contemporary childhood. Children need limits to learn from, but that is
not the same as limiting them purely by virtue of how old they are.
Adult authority which is necessary should not be confused with adult
power that is abused.
Nor should contemplation of children's rights —
whether it involves the UN Convention, domestic legislation or a more
intangible cultural change — be seen as an inevitable erosion of those
of adults. If anything, offering power to a child augments the adult's
role in teaching them how to use it humanely.
Children's rights are not a liberal luxury. They are
real, and deserved. Children have the right not to be hit, to make
mistakes and to learn from them. They have the right to be consulted
about decisions that affect their future. Children's rights are
respected in countless ordinary homes across the country. But where they
are not, particularly in the case of children growing up on the margins,
they must be fought for.
Libby Brooks
3 July 3, 2006
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1811328,00.html
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