The Role of Children in Shaping New Contexts of Children’s Rights

Abstract

We understand ‘children’s rights from below’ in a double sense: on the one hand, we emphasize that children in the societies known to us — for whatever reasons — are a subordinated and powerless social ‘group’ who are reliant on rights which they can use to overcome generational and other social inequalities. On the other hand, we emphasize, in view of children as individuals, that they, like adults, have specific capacities that change constantly during a lifetime and enable them to exercise their rights. These capacities can be different from those that adults have, but they cannot be understood as biological fact or expression of physical development per se but are, as cognitive, moral and social capacities, also products of specific living and generational relations. In all their possible differences, they are neither inferior nor ‘worth’ less than the capacities ascribed to adults. Their lesser ‘weight’ as typically seen characteristic of children is, itself, an expression of the social power relations, which are to be faced by the acknowledgement and ‘equality’ of children as subjects. Children’s rights can help to bring about this change.

I am Prema from Uppunda Panchayat. When we went to do the survey, the teacher who had taught me said: ‘Now you have become very sharp’. Then I said, ‘When I used to come to the school, you had told me that I was good enough only to break fish necks. I am the same girl’.

(Our Survey Story, by Bhima Sangha and Makkala Panchayat, India, 2001)