Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 20

This chapter has explored how and why children became an object of policy concern in the long nineteenth century. The ‘child-savers’ succeeded in bringing children into the centre of social policy, and in the shift from charitable and philanthropic concern to state responsibility a discourse of child rights began to circulate and take hold. The shift from child-saving to child rights culminated in the UNCRC, which then became the underpinnings for international development that increasingly took the figure of the child as the justification for its activities. In doing so it did not entirely displace child-saving. In the UNCRC and in the international declarations that foreshadowed it, children remain a special category of person who are entitled to protection from harm by virtue of their specific vulnerabilities rather than simply by virtue of their humanity.