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Children's rights movement
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The children's rights movement is a historical and modern movement committed to the acknowledgement, expansion, and/or regression of the rights of children around the world.
Contents |
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.
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.[1] 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.
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.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has attempted to outline a standard premise for the children's rights movement, there is no international standard which all children or adults adhere to. Two nations – the United States and Somalia – have refused to ratify the CRC; 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.
The US has opposed ratifying the CRC 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.” Report by the Secretary of State to the Congress,” October 2003, Part 2
Groups that politically oppose U.S. Ratification of the CRC include but are not limited to: 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.
In her remarks to The World Congress of Families III, Mexico City, Mexico, on March 29, 2004, Ambassador Ellen Sauerbrey, U.S. Representative to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, “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.”
A Canadian lawyer has proposed that although the concept of children's rights, on the surface, appears to be an ideal goal, there are dangerous political and legal changes that may leave children at the mercy of the government.[2]
The key difference between children's rights and youth rights is that children's rights supporters generally advocate the establishment and enforcement of protection for children and youths, while youth rights (a far smaller movement) generally advocates the expansion of freedom for children and/or youths and of rights such as suffrage.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been linked to the idea that in the case of divorce or separation of parents, sole custody should only occur when it is in the "best interests of the child".[3]
- ^ 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”
- ^ Silver, C. (nd) Protecting Parental Liberty in a Child-Centered Legal System
- ^ Birks, Stuart (June 2002). INCLUSION OR EXCLUSION II:WHY THE FAMILY COURT PROTESTS?". Centre for Public Policy Evaluation College of Business, Massey University. Retrieved on 2007-04-13.
- Children's rights in Islam - parental rights given to children in Muslim families.
- Youth rights
- Wage labour
- Child labour
- Social criticism
- Fear of childbirth
- Pregnant patients' rights, which affect newborns as well as their mothers
- Child camel jockeys - Modern Day Slavery of Children
- ChilOut (Children Out of Detention), children in immigration detention in Australia
- Children and Rights By Murray N. Rothbard
- Canadian Children's Rights Council
- Spence. T. 1796 The Rights of Infants
- Trafficked child dies in prison, other victims are sentenced to jail
- Quake orphans "adopted" for Jihad
- Fight 4 Kids Internet Parenting Support
- 2 year old sentenced to 3 years imprisonment
- 12 year old girl being forced into marriage with 50 year old man
- Casa Alianza - Fighting for children's human rights in Central America]
- The Children's Rights Programme of the OMCT
- Material on UK child labor and reform movements 1750-1900
- Material on USA child labor and reform movements
- International Research on Working Children IREWOC is closely in touch both with the academic world and with development practitioners
- Mkombozi Center for Street Children