Reinventing children's rights

Bibliographic Data

ID3407572
AuthorsKarl Hanson (0009-0004-5379-2811, University of Geneva, Switzerland April 2022, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume29
Issue2
Pages149-156
Publication date2022-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueChildhood (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0907-5682 • E-ISSN: 1461-7013
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/09075682221098593
OpenAlexW4280593380
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited22

In a changing world we constantly need to adjust our thinking patterns and frameworks to help making sense of the continuing transformations that have a bearing on children, childhood and children's rights.Many authors and initiatives contribute to that task.In 2016 Florian Esser et al. edited a collected volume entitled Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood, which engages with the theoretical, practical, historical and institutional dimensions of the concept of agency in childhood studies.In their edited volume published in 2018 entitled Reimagining Childhood Studies, Spyros Spyrou et al. discuss future directions of the expanding and vibrant field of childhood studies that they locate at an important junction in its 25 years old history of research and theorising.A few years earlier, in 2013, Olga Nieuwenhuys and I participated in the field's collective reconceptualization efforts through our edited volume entitled Reconceptualizing Children's Rights in International Development.In that book, we presented a conceptual framework composed of the notions living rights, social justice and translations that wants to capture the complex flux and interrelations between legal arrangements, social practices and discourses on children's rights.More recently, the online Reconstructing Children's Rights Institute has been hosting in 2021 a series of conversations and resources to critically examine racism, neo-colonialism and patriarchy in humanitarian and development efforts to protect children and support families.The initiators posit that humanitarian and development aid, if practiced incorrectly and without making explicit the underlying power dynamics and funding mechanisms, 'can cause harm and undermine the dignity and autonomy of those it intends to support, who become othered "beneficiaries."' 1 To counter the negative consequences of the international children's rights and child protection regime, the online institute wants to set in motion reflections and practical experiments how to 'dismantle and reconstruct' the existing children's rights system.In this editorial I want to move the undertaking a step further and reflect on what it would entail to 'reinvent' children's rights altogether.The act to reinvent is a challenging and unstable one that might lead to replacing the extant regime with an entirely new and better adapted version, but it can also lead to merely duplicating an already existing framework, in which case it would be a wasted effort.As we are all newcomers (Kannan et al., 2022) who must constantly reappropriate the field's histories and concepts, the costs for reinventing something that already exists are not very high compared to the potential benefits of bringing even if it is only a few novel ideas to the conversation.How can children's rights be reinvented to keep pace with the incessantly changing environments in which they operate

Criminology · Political science · Sociology · Children's Rights and Participation · Early Childhood Education and Development · Gender Studies · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare · Psychology

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