For Their Own Good

When conceptualizing the societal treatment of children, as with many other marginalized groups, we often use the framework of human rights. But considering their dependent status, there isn't just one coherent paradigm of "children's rights" that conveys a clear idea of the utopian treatment of children. Rather, the term encompasses wildly diverging and often entirely contradictory approaches. Today we'll cover two subcategories of children's rights, the history of each approach, and the overall effectiveness of this framework for improving the treatment of children around the world.

In Michael Grossberg's chapter "Liberation and Caretaking: Fighting Over Children's Rights in Postwar America" in Reinventing Childhood After WWII, he introduces two subcategories of children's rights. Liberationist rights are those that emphasize young people's autonomy, arguing that they should have more control over their own lives. Caretaking rights, on the other hand, emphasize their dependent status, and advocate for parents, guardians, the state, or others to care for and exercise control over children. The tension between these concepts lies in their differing views on children's capacity to understand and act in their own best interest.

Liberationist views of children's rights enjoyed a heyday in the United States from the 1940s to the 1970s. They first entered mainstream political and legal discourse post-WWII, then escalated through the civil rights movement. Most controversy over liberationist rights revolved around the "child-friendly" media censorship, the right to political protest, compulsory schooling, and control over leisure activities. The most radical proponents advocated for the installation of full legal rights applied to adults, erasing children's subordinate status entirely. The liberationist view culminated in the short-lived youth liberation movement of the 1970s, and died away from public discourse after that.

Caretaking rights have been the more popular and more powerful view of children's rights ever since the inception of the concept in the nineteenth century. The modern model of childhood itself, based in schooling instead of work, extended the legal and economic dependent status of children. While the caretaking view was counterbalanced by the liberationist view from the postwar period through the youth liberation movement, it expanded greatly as the latter declined. Notions of stranger danger, teenage pregnancy, superpredators, and other horrors with racial and class connotations gained purchase in the public imagination through the next few decades. Alongside them, a broadening idea that innocent souls of (white) children needed to be protected from the corruption of the world.

The turbocharged caretaking view worked in tandem with other legal, social, and economic processes to facilitate a dramatic shift in the nature of US childhood. The rise of car-centric infrastructure and defunding of public transit made children more dependent on adults for transportation. The privatization of education and recreation, as well as growing income inequality and real estate development, caused the further enclosure of childhood from public life: fewer children playing freely in their neighborhoods and surrounding open areas, and more engaging in regimented extracurricular activities such as sports, art and dance classes, and tutoring. The criminalization of loitering, proliferation of police officers in schools, expansion of legal definitions of child neglect, and dramatic increase of juvenile incarceration all imposed stricter behavioral norms on both children and their caretakers under the threat of racialized state violence. With the caretaking view the most powerful it has ever been, US childhood today is consequently surveilled and controlled on an unprecedented scale.

The idea of children's rights has many strengths: international recognition, lots of funding and infrastructure, decades of legal precedence. It has played a large role in the steeply declining (explicit) consideration of children as property. The modern school-based model of childhood precedes the children's rights framework, but the framework nonetheless provides strong rhetorical justification for making quality education available to all children regardless of race, class, gender, and disability. It is one of the foremost tools for fighting child slavery and waged labor exploitation globally. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world (by every member of the UN except the United States); it enshrines children's rights to food, housing, education, culture, protection from harm, and more into international law.

But the framework of children's rights also has many significant weaknesses. It is deployed/enforced unevenly and often without regard for the material reasons behind child abuse and exploitation. In a global political context, it becomes a tool for wealthy imperial core countries to assert blame and exert political pressure on poorer peripheral countries while simultaneously papering over child exploitation within their own borders. Even more egregiously, the rights framework is deployed to denounce child labor in, for example, garment production in Bangladesh while diverting blame from the US fast fashion companies that maintain and profit heavily from the exploitation as well as the US appetite for cheap clothing that continues to fund this system. There is no inbuilt mechanism in the children's rights framework that acknowledges the centrality of capitalism in the exploitation of children's labor.

Nor does the children's rights framework give a clear understanding of the path forward. Even when we identify children's rights to housing, food, education, medical care, and other basic needs, the framework does not provide specific guidance for how to ensure children can actually access these rights. The framework does not inherently advocate for children to be able to access them independently from their parents/guardians (and in fact it enshrines the subordination of children to their parents). Since the rights system does not identify capitalist accumulation as the engine of children's exploitation, it also has no clear plan for how to eliminate children's exploitation. What emerges is a patchwork approach: one that caters to the preferences of imperial core governments and corporations. And as long as the people who work to abolish children's exploitation have to cater to those who perpetuate it, they will never fully solve the problem.

The last problem with the framework of children's rights that I'd like to discuss here is the way it is used to uphold cultural imperialism. Children's rights are used to export Western standards/styles of childhood to non-Western countries. The problem here is twofold:

1. By treating (white) Western standards of childhood as the ideal, we treat other forms of childhood as backward and unevolved. We disregard the strengths of more collective approaches and resist learning from other cultures. We deny all the ways that we could improve upon these standards with a more global perspective. This process is inextricable from white supremacy in general: the idea that white Western nations have a fundamentally and comprehensively superior notion of childhood compared to peripheral nations must be understood within the larger context of establishing racial superiority.
2. Simultaneously, we downplay the harm that the West does to children every day. Children within the West, despite ostensibly having children's rights, are subject to high degrees of legal/political/social repression without much pushback. Children outside of the West are often subject to even more direct and brutal violence by Western governments and corporations (e.g. the deliberate bombing, shooting, and dismemberment of children in Gaza). But because of their outsized geopolitical power, and the lack of a global youth movement with any meaningful leverage, these organizations are never held fully accountable for the harms they perpetrate.

The idea that the West is kind to children, or is a particularly responsible steward of children's rights and well-being, is a farce. It is the product of decades of propaganda. Whatever rhetorical commitment the children's rights framework represents to a happy, safe, empowered childhood regardless of race, class, gender, and disability - it all pales in the face of the racist, classist, sexist, and ableist systems the framework continues to uphold.

Children's rights are presented as an unquestionable good, but like with everything else, the real story is more complicated. It is a complex and often self-contradictory concept, one that is used to restrict children's movement and self-determination as often as it is to help them fulfill their needs for survival. When we approach this framework uncritically, we enable its use in imperialist and white supremacist propaganda.

Children deserve good things! I hope that much is self-evident. In criticizing the framework of children's rights, I am not arguing against supporting children's well-being in general - just the opposite. The rights framework is simply inadequate in defining children's well-being as well as supporting its implementation. It lacks the coherence and consistency needed to serve its stated purpose effectively. Most importantly, the way that children's rights are beholden to the power of imperialist governments and parents means that the framework ultimately serves to benefit those groups over children themselves.

If we want a system that truly supports the well-being of children, we need to build one that can tackle the mistreatment of children at its roots. It needs to be able to identify capitalism as the engine of children's contemporary exploitation and the family as its unit of reproduction. It needs to view human development not as a dichotomy (child/adult, dependent/independent) but as a spectrum. It needs to connect these questions of self-determination and caregiving with the corresponding struggles in the historical and contemporary movements for disability, transgender, racial, and feminist liberation. It needs to acknowledge childhood as a socially constructed marginalization and not just as a set of biological limitations. Only then can this system understand the true nature of the problems children face, and only then can it begin to solve them.

• Grossberg, Michael. "2. Liberation and Caretaking: Fighting over Children’s Rights in Postwar America" In Reinventing Childhood After World War II edited by Paula S. Fass and Michael Grossberg, 19-37. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812205169.19
• Faulkner, Elizabeth A., and Conrad Nyamutata. “The Decolonisation of Children’s Rights and the Colonial Contours of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.” The International Journal of Children’s Rights 28, no. 1 (March 10, 2020): 66–88. https://doi.org/10.1163/15718182-02801009.
• The International Bureau for Children’s Rights (IBCR) Historical Timeline of Children’s Rights https://www.ibcr.org/en/news/a-historical-timeline-to-understand-childrens-rights-evolution-througout-time/
• UN General Assembly, Convention on the Rights of the Child, United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 1577, p. 3, 20 November 1989, https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/convention-text