Injustices faced by children during the COVID-19 pandemic and crucial next steps
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SPECIAL SECTION ON COVID-19: LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Injustices faced by children during the COVID-19 pandemic and crucial next steps Sydney Campbell 1 & Franco A. Carnevale 2 Received: 10 August 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 / Published online: 3 September 2020 # The Canadian Public Health Association 2020
Dear Editor, At present, data regarding SARS-CoV-2 impacts on children and youth (henceforth: young people) seem promising. Young people tend to be infected less frequently and, for those who are infected, the outcomes seem better than adult counterparts (Patel forthcoming 2020). However, statements of this type undermine the complex lives of young people and, by extension, the multifaceted impacts that young people are facing due to the COVID-19 pandemic and related preventive measures. These impacts span psychosocial, behavioural, and physical divides (Chanchlani et al. 2020) and are heightened for those who face socio-economic and/or racial marginalization (Van Lancker and Parolin 2020; Suleman et al. 2020) and those with pre-existing conditions (Wong et al. 2020). Positioning young people as mere “germ spreaders” ignores the diverse interests and voices of young people, and the particular ways they have been harmed throughout this pandemic. As researchers and policymakers have started examining these impacts, ethical analyses have been mostly absent from reported evidence. Justice provides a sound ethical framework for examining harms faced by young people by analyzing the unjust ways: (i) impacts specific to young people have been handled in policy and practice (i.e., a form of substantive injustice, or injustice resulting from unfair/disproportionate outcomes of decisions that are not morally justified (Miller 2017)) or (ii) young people’s voices and perspectives have been disregarded in pandemic policies (i.e., a form of procedural injustice, or injustice related to the process by which
burdens and benefits are distributed (Miller 2017)). Overall, young people are seen as capable enough to deal with many of the issues they have faced, without sufficient support, but too incapable to contribute to policy discussions, pushing their perspectives to the periphery. Advances in childhood ethics predict these outcomes, challenging the ways young people are often viewed as moral objects by calling for opportunities for young people to participate at a policy level and be repositioned to active moral agents (Carnevale et al. 2020). Based on this justice lens, we put forward the following calls for urgent change in policy and practice: &
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& * Sydney Campbell [email protected] 1
Institute of Health Policy, Management & Evaluation, University of Toronto, 155 College St, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON M5T 3M6, Canada
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McGill University, 680 Sherbrooke West, #1800, Montreal, Quebec H3A 0G4, Canada
Organizations, institutions, and governments should develop policies and practices to meaningfully engage young people as active contributors in pandemic policy planning deliberations; Research related to
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