Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 19

Alongside the development of a body of international law aimed at child protection and, eventually, at the realization of child rights, the governing of childhood was extended globally through the transformation of what is now the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) into a global development agency. Like the 1924 and the 1959 legislation (and the 1989 UNCRC if we include the Cold War), UNICEF’s role in governing childhood came out of its role in protecting children after conflict. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA) was set up towards the end of the anti-fascist war in Europe and the Pacific to provide relief to war-affected populations. UNRAA had developed programmes to feed ‘children in need’ and support children’s health. When it was being wound up Ludwik Rajchman, the Polish UNRRA delegate and former head of the League of Nations Health Organization, argued successfully for the need for an agency to continue to provide aid for war-affected children (Morris 2015: 180). The UN General Assembly unanimously resolved in 1946 ‘to create the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) for the benefit of children and adolescents affected by war, for those receiving UNRRA assistance, and “for child health purposes generally” (UN General assembly 1946)’ (Morris 2015: 180). They were given the funds that remained with UNRAA to start this work. Continuing the mandate of UNRAA, UNICEF’s initial focus was on emergency assistance to women and children in Europe. Recognizing the continuation of child-saving frames in UNICEF’s work, Jennifer Morris notes that ‘Funding, procurement, and distribution efforts relied on the knowledge gained from these organizations [Save the Children and UNRAA] and built on a history of mother and child health and welfare care that had first emerged in the West from the Christian tradition in Europe that called for ministering to the poor’ (2015: 11). Children were ‘the easily acceptable humanitarian target’ (2015: 44). Maurice Pate, UNICEF’s first executive director, pushed the organization towards an agenda of economic and social development underpinned by child welfare. The framework of child welfare, though, was neither a charity nor an international welfare state but ‘an investment in the future’ (Morris 2015: 132).

The focus of UNICEF was gradually expanded to nutrition and medical relief, the latter bringing it into some conflict with the incipient World Health Organization. It moved into disease prevention and eradication work including mass child immunization campaigns. In 1953 the UN renewed UNICEF’s charter indefinitely. In response to neo-liberal shifts in development policy and its health impacts, UNICEF launched the ‘child survival revolution’ (Meier et al. 2018: 180) and continues to hold a prominent role in global health governance. UNICEF’s work conceptualized the health of children and disease prevention as fundamental to global development (2018: 181). UNICEF viewed itself ‘as a “catalytic agent” to advance both children’s health and a country’s socioeconomic development’ (2018: 182).

The UNCRC was adopted by UNICEF as the legal foundation for its work and child rights became central to its identity. The UNCRC specifically identifies UNCIEF as an implementing authority and in 1999 UNICEF adopted a human rights conceptual framework for its activities (Santos Pais 1999: 2). This framework aimed to combine meeting children’s needs with ‘the recognition and realization of their human rights’ (1999: 6). The aim was not only to deliver resources to children but to ‘intervene as advocates for children’. The framework paper that announced this new direction in UNICEF wanted to ‘place children at the centre of the development agenda’ (1999: 14).

Globalization has not only occurred at the level of increased international cooperation between states and increased financial flows. It has also involved a parallel shift below in both the movements of people and increased communication across national borders and the emergence of an incipient international civil society. The phenomenal growth in NGOs operating at the international level, or INGOs, is part of this emergent international civil society. International human rights law and particularly the UNCRC have played an important part in creating a role for INGOs and therefore stimulating their expansion.

In the UN Charter there is provision for consultation with NGOs. It has been claimed that this provision ‘has produced much of the international practice concerning NGOs, and the “rights” given to them’ (Breen 2003: 455). NGOs participated in the drafting of the Convention through their involvement with the Ad Hoc NGO Group on the Drafting of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (now the NGO Group for the Convention on the Rights of the Child). It was through this group that ‘NGOs had a direct and indirect impact on this Convention that is without parallel in the history of drafting international instruments’ (Breen 2003: 457, citing Cantwell 1992). The Convention is also the only international human rights treaty that expressly gives NGOs a role in monitoring its implementation (Breen 2003: 457).

Save the Children (SCF) established itself as part of the international governance of the ‘world’s children’ in 1924 when the Child Welfare Committee was created at the League of Nations and the then Save the Children International Union (SCIU) was given an advisory seat. In the same year the Assembly of the League of Nations adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child drafted by Eglantyne Jebb, the founder of SCF (Marshall 2004: 276). Their interest in ‘the world’s children’ as an object of concern caused the SCF and other philanthropists to turn their attention to governing childhood in the colonies. To this end in 1931 SCF convened the first conference on the African child. Two hundred delegates, including missionaries, social scientists, government officials and philanthropists, attended this conference. Only seven of the delegates were Africans. Four years later the invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War ended the SCF’s attention to the ‘problem’ of the African child and the Fund did not return to working in sub-Saharan Africa until the 1950s, alongside many other organizations including Oxfam and UNICEF (Marshall 2004: 275).

The turn to the African child and the 1931 conference can therefore be thought of as an internationalizing of child governance that predates the 1989 UNCRC by over half a century. This suggests that there is a continuity to the place of the child in international relations, indeed in the constitution of the international as a sphere of humanitarian action, and certainly of international civil society. In the preliminary meeting for the conference, held in November 1928, three themes for future work were agreed on: ‘infant mortality, child labor in relation to education, and child marriage’ (Marshall 2004: 278). It is noteworthy that these remain central foci of contemporary global governance of the child. The comment of one of the delegates remains as pertinent today as it was in 1931: ‘the welfare of children with particular reference to infant mortality and to questions of education, economics and labor, was probably the only subject in the world on which [we] could conceivably devise a concerted policy’ (Marshall 2004: 281).