Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 17

Child rights and child-saving are both discourses about how to govern childhood. Child-saving has a long history and is embedded in wider discourses about suffering, vulnerability and charity. Child rights emerged alongside the increasing penetration of the state into family on the one hand and a body of humanitarian law on the other.

The field of child law is not new; debates about the legal competence of young people and the necessity of separate legal procedures for dealing with minors date back to at least the sixteenth century. Alongside this concern about when children could be held responsible for breaking the law runs a connected anxiety about how to keep children from causing injury or harm to themselves or others. It is this anxiety that fuelled the child-saving movements of the nineteenth century in North America and Europe discussed above, but the concern about the ability of children to distinguish right from wrong and the moral instruction of children are there in the writings of Locke and in the records left by the Puritans in sixteenth-century colonial America.

Prior to the nineteenth century laws governing childhood were enacted, if at all, at the national level. From the beginning of the twentieth century, in tandem with the expansion of the state into family life, international norms, policies and laws about child rights were developed to govern childhood on a global scale. However, then as now, this architecture of international rights and norms was erected in a highly uneven international system of states and territories.

International law was developed to establish mutually agreed rules of conduct on international matters between sovereign states. The Treaty of Westphalia, which is considered to be the beginning of the formation of a community of states, was signed in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years War in Europe. Child rights law arose out of a much more recent body of international law: humanitarian and human rights law. It attempts to govern not only relations between states, as international law had previously done, but also relations between states and societies. The expansion of this field of law to children has been sporadic and, interestingly, much of it was formulated in response to the impacts of war on children.

The League of Nations, which was formed after the First World War to try and prevent future wars, adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924. It was drafted by the founder of Save the Children, Eglantyne Jebb. The five articles of the declaration were simple and replaced a discourse of solidarity that had animated sections within the early child-saving moments (and arguably in the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Minimum Age Conventions discussed below), with one of quasi-religious sentiment:

1 The child must be given the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually;

2 The child that is hungry must be fed; the child that is sick must be nursed; the child that is backward must be helped; the delinquent child must be reclaimed; and the orphan and the waif must be sheltered and succoured;

3 The child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress;

4 The child must be put in a position to earn a livelihood, and must be protected against every form of exploitation;

5 The child must be brought up in the consciousness that its talents must be devoted to the service of its fellow men.

In drawing on a Romantic and religious discourse the Declaration was framed in the language of nineteenth-century child-saving. The Declaration was not enforceable in law and was endorsed by the League as a World Child Welfare Charter. Nonetheless the very fact that the hegemonic powers in the international system framed a commitment to the ‘rights of the child’ laid the foundations for the emergence of the rights-bearing child because it incorporated the child into law, into public life, and set the child outside of the sphere of the family.

An expanded version of the League of Nations Declaration was adopted by the UN in 1959. This introduces the principle of ‘best interests’ which is an important element in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). It also removes the child’s right to work from the earlier Declaration (see point 4 above), replacing it with the entitlement to free and compulsory elementary education. The 1959 Declaration continued to define the child as principally in need of protection and special consideration rather than as a rights-bearing individual. It is not until the drafting of the UNCRC that the child is addressed as a rights-bearing individual, although even in the UNCRC child-saving remains a dominant theme.

The concerns of the 1924 and 1959 Declaration on the protection of children were echoed to some extent in the adoption by the ILO of Conventions to restrict child labour. The ILO adopted Minimum Age Conventions in 1919 (industry) and 1921 (agriculture). The Minimum Age (Industry) Convention (No. 5) was adopted in 1919 and ratified by the UK in 1921, the year it came into force, but it was not ratified by France until 1939 and was never ratified by the USA. The Minimum Age (Agriculture) Convention (No. 10) was adopted in 1921 but was not ratified by any of the major powers until several decades afterwards. Furthermore, Convention 10 is concerned with ensuring that agricultural labourers under the age of 14 years could combine their work with their education. The Convention therefore continued to support the gradual expansion of school education and decline in child labour that accompanied the development of technology on the one hand, and the increased need for numerate and literate citizens on the other.