As with many scholars currently working in the area of childhood studies, my research is not “purely academic” (as if there were such a thing), but grounded in advocacy movements within the academy aimed at bettering the lives of children. My particular contribution toward this goal is in exposing the constructed nature of childhood, particularly as these ideas are mediated through movies. Cinematic images primarily provide viewers with comfortable caricatures of “the child” coded as vulnerable, dependent and innocent, a constellation of qualities considered innate to real children, who are then treated as defenseless, needy and incapable with ostensibly capable adults positioned and empowered to protect and provide for them, yet it is precisely within such hierarchical relationships of complete dependency that children are most susceptible to violence in all its many forms.

 

Rights have emerged as the means by which children’s flourishing and freedom from abuse might best be achieved, but their ostensible culmination in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is open to criticism. That the convention extends rights to “the child”, an abstraction distinct from actual children, underscores its many shortcomings. It has been evaluated by a number of scholars as disappointing, incoherent, adultist, as well as criticized for universalizing the experience of childhood and globalizing the minority-world vision of children as weak, dependent, and vulnerable despite an abundance of historical and cross-cultural evidence demonstrating the capacities of children and their contributions to the communities in which they live.

 

My commitment to securing rights for children is not, therefore, to reify the particular codification of such found in the UNCRC, but to push beyond its so-called three P’s – provision, protection and thus far only tokenistic participation – to extend them the same emancipatory rights ostensibly guaranteed to all humans under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). A number of these are denied to or reconfigured for “the child” in the UNCRC, which prompts the question, as articulated in the title of Ann Quennerstedt’s 2010 article in the International Journal of Children’s Rights: “Children, But Not Really Humans?” The time is thus ripe for a substantial revision of the convention, this time with the full participation of children, to resolve the tensions that currently exist between the UNCRC and the UDHR. That is, it is time to treat children as fully human.

 

                                                                                                                            JMJ

 

* This statement is condensed from a paper I presented at a conference held at the Vancouver School of Theology in 2021 on thoughtful activism and will feature in a revised and expanded form in an upcoming volume of Wipf and Stock’s Religious Pluralism and Public Life series.