A Future for Children’s Rights

Abstract

Michael King has argued that Convention on the Rights of the Child (CROC) is like the magical fairy Tinkerbell from “Peter Pan.” Like Tinkerbell, the Convention possesses the power to change children’s lives but in order to do so it depends on the people believing in its existence.¹ As lovely as this analogy is, it is simply not enough for people to just believe in the existence of children’s rights. Belief is a hard subject to introduce into any social science project. One’s belief in the power and existence of children’s rights can be just as easily countered by someone else’s belief in the superiority of the family, the subordinate status of children, and the denial of rights to children. How does one resolve a debate based on belief? Rights do not appear out of nowhere like magical fairies. Rights, as I have argued here, are not based on belief but justification. Rather than have an ultimately fruitless debate about belief in the existence of such rights, the proper approach is to have a debate about what it is that such rights are intended to protect and why or why not those things are worth protecting. Rights are human creations; they are powerful social and political tools for change.