Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 14

This chapter is about how charitable institutions, philanthropists and government have responded to the problem of child poverty on a national and international scale. It shows how a wave of reform energy targeted on children in the nineteenth century in North America and Europe gradually moved the responsibility for children’s welfare from charities to governments. While the entry of government into the fields of child welfare and juvenile justice did not eradicate charities from the landscape, it did reframe concern for children within a new political paradigm of rights and justice. This gradual shift from child-saving to child rights is evident in the emergence of national and international law intended to protect the rights of the child and found its fullest expression in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, a simple evolutionary narrative of a concern for child welfare that moves from child-saving to child rights does not tell the whole story. In practice the field of child welfare constantly shifts around these two poles rather than moving decisively from one to the other.