Editorial Note: The intersection of child rights and women's rights
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Editorial Note: The intersection of child and women’s rights WENDY HARCOURT
Since the 1990s, human rights has become one of the main pillars of development thinking and policy with the shift from assistance and charity to a broader, more political, struggle around people’s rights to freedom to live a dignified and fulfilling life. The women’s rights movements around the world have been at the forefront of this shift in the fight to make women’s rights a human rights issue and to break down the power structures that discriminate against women. The child rights movement has added its own voice strongly in the last decade. However, even given major legal and political recognition of women’s rights, and today’s strong focus on child rights, growing income inequities, poor access to resources and deeply engrained gender biases prevent women and children from enjoying full economic, social and political rights. This edition of Development aims to explore how the women’s rights and child rights movements could best confront this situation by looking at what these two movements can offer each other. One of the critical lessons learnt by the women’s rights movement is that the fulfillment of women’s rights does not mean just adding in women alongside men. It requires deep and profound changes to society on all levels. These are political, cultural and social changes that not all individuals, men and women, or institutions are ready to make. To change the discourse of the ‘other’ is complex. Women have long argued that women should not be defined in some universal sense as only mothers, wombs, breast milk providers, wives and grandmothers. They need to be seen as diverse people ethnically, racially, culturally, with working lives, joys and pleasures, desires and needs within and outside the home and community as they carry out their nurturing and caring function. The women’s rights movements worldwide ask for conditions that ensure women’s own autonomy and livelihood, as well as the conditions for them to take up their responsibilities towards children and adults of all ages in their care. A lot can be learnt from the various women movements’ painful
Development 44(2): Upfront
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attempts to fight the prejudices, even within the movements themselves, which prevent the fulfillment of those sets of rights. As past issues of Development have documented, even as the rights framework is adopted on paper the cultural, economic and political realities can prevent the conditions for the rights to be respected, protected, promoted and fulfilled. For example, women’s reproductive rights were firmly embedded in the agreements reached during the International Conference on Population and Development in 1994. But in order for these rights to be put into practice, there is a need for major shifts in allocation of resources to education and health institutions as well as retraining of medical and family planning staff at all levels. Instead, governments are cutting funds in these areas in an effort to comply with the economic str
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