Child Rights
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Child Rights
Description
Tali Gal1 and Bilha Davidson-Arad2 1 School of Criminology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel 2 School of Social Work, Tel Aviv, Israel
Historical Overview “Children’s rights” is a relatively modern concept that has been developed largely during the twentieth century. Until the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, children in Western nations were regarded as property of their fathers, who could sell, abandon, marry, physically punish, or enslave their children without any state intervention (Hart 1991). The first child-related legislation developed during the industrial revolution, which generated a need to regulate children’s labor. Youth labor laws banned the work of young children and created limitations on the work of adolescents. Next, mandatory education laws were enacted in order to secure children’s future capabilities and prevent truancy and public disorder. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the “child saviors” movement initiated laws and societies protecting children from abuse. The youth court in Chicago was established in 1899 and signaled the beginning of a separate juvenile justice system, where youth offenses as well as child protection cases were adjudicated separately in a protectionist manner. The “child saving” approach was salient during most of the twentieth century and emphasized the need to protect children’s safety and well-being, sometime at the price of their autonomy.
Synonyms Children’s rights; Rights of the child
Definition It is a conceptual approach toward children (defined by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as all human beings below the age of 18 unless the local legislation provides otherwise) as rights holders. It is generally accepted that children hold basic universal human rights such as the right to life, equality, and dignity; children also hold child-specific rights such as the right to development, to nurture and care, and to education. Legal rights such as the right to free speech, due process, and privacy have also been acknowledged in laws and legal precedents, but their scope is generally more limited than that of the legal rights of adults. The most disputable is the right of children to make autonomous decisions or, alternatively, to take part in decision-making processes regarding their own matters.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 F. Maggino (ed.), Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_332-2
2
During the 1970s, few scholars, and particularly John Holt and Richard Farson, argued that children should be seen as a minority group that deserves to have adult freedoms and selfdetermination rights (Farson 1974; Holt 1974). These “Child Liberationists” advocated for granting children adults’ rights such as the right to vote, to own property, to sign contracts, to drive, and to choose their education. The liberationist movement was criticized for “abandoning children to their rights” b
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