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- Adami, Rebecca, 1982-
(författare)
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Childism : On adult resistance against children's rights
- 2023
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Ingår i: The Rights of the Child. - : Brill Nijhoff. - 9789004511156 - 9789004511163 ; , s. 127-147
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The concept of childism is, in this chapter, used primarily as a theoretical approach to analyse adult resistance against the realisation of children’s rights. Childism can help us to understand children’s exposure to negative prejudices, attitudes and discriminatory structures in society. This chapter argues, that in order to address discrimination against children on a systemic level, a critical approach in child rights studies on negative beliefs against children is needed to illuminate prejudice ingrained in the ways in which policies and laws are formulated on a structural level. By studying discourses that lead to abuse of children we may better understand underlying reasons to the challenges facing a respect for children’s rights internationally. Reasons and arguments given for why children are denied basic rights and freedoms can be systematically examined over time by addressing how adult’s prejudice about children lead to age-based discrimination against children. These intersectional understandings of subordination may inform affirmative policy needed for realising the rights of the child. The chapter calls for further empirical studies that interrelate violations of children’s rights with different overlapping forms of prejudice and discrimination against children.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Holappa, Tim, 1989-, et al.
(författare)
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Child Rights without Substance? – Swedish Public Welfare and the Invisibility of Children in Economic Support Cases
- 2023
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Ingår i: The Rights of the Child. - Leiden : Brill Nijhoff. - 9789004511163 - 9789004511156 ; , s. 34-57
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Combating poverty has been a central aspect in the building of the Swedish welfare state and the focus today is on different types of support to families with children. Both the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and other legal instruments clearly state that a child has the right to an adequate standard of living. Despite this, and the fact that Sweden is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, child poverty is still a problem. Against this background it is natural to pose questions of what a child’s right to an adequate standard of living actually means, and whether there are legal explanations for why these rights are not realized and fulfilled in Sweden today. In this chapter children’s right to adequate standard of living and the regulations for the outermost social safety net are analyzed from a critical legal perspective. The objective is to highlight underlying assumptions and conditions that limit the possibilities to effect children’s rights, and which might even give rise to a silent acceptance of the fact that certain children are poor in one of the world’s richest countries. The analysis demonstrates challenging aspects in both the CRC and the Swedish national legal regulations that may be contributing to child poverty in Sweden today. The regulations create layers of problematic basic assumptions and conditions that risk rendering invisible children’s specific needs and rights. This occurs first with the premise that children’s rights are primarily invoked by the parents, who must apply for and accept economic support, but also distribute the resources received in a manner that benefits their children. A second problematic layer is the fact that support can be made conditional through certain requirements imposed on the parents that can be both unreasonable and disproportional from a child perspective. There are no self-evident solutions to the identified problems, but one thing is certain – the current legal structures do not create reasonable and equal living conditions for all children in Sweden today and there is a need for clarifications on what the right to an adequate standard of living for children are supposed to mean in Sweden today.
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| 4. |
- Schiratzki, Johanna, 1963-
(författare)
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Children’s Right to Have Rights – on the Importance of Statutory Rights for Swedish Children Living outside the Country
- 2023
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Ingår i: The Rights of the Child. - Leiden/Boston : Brill Nijhoff. - 9789004511156 - 9789004511163 ; , s. 15-31
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The rights of the child are a multi-dimensional phenomenon that could be conceptualized from many angels, as witnesses this anthology. The multi-dimensional perspective remains within a singular field of knowledge, such as legal science. The complexity of children’s rights may, at least in part, explain the yearning for more statutory rights to meet the expectations of rights as tools for a better society. An example is the momentum behind the 2020 incorporation of the CRC into Swedish statutory law. The incorporation adds to the numerous statutes regarding children in Swedish law, covering most childhood; from reproduction through healthcare, parental break-up, education, delinquency and coming of age. An important challenge, however, is the understanding of the right to equal treatment for children whom are considered to have a “weak” legal connection to the Sweden. This might be children seeking asylum, undocumented children, EU-migrants but also children with dual-citizenship. Recent development indicates that Swedish child citizens in the detention camps in the North-eastern Syria are to be added to this category. This development has prompted a disagreement between the United Nations’ High Commissioner of Human Rights and the Swedish Government on the importance of human rights, statutory rights and jurisdiction. Taking stock of the statutory rights of children according to Swedish law, the legal measures available for the repatriation of the reported 30 Swedish children from the detention camps in the north-eastern Syria are outlined as a test-case of the importance of statutory rights for children.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Aspán, Margareta, 1965-
(författare)
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Article 31 – the Forgotten Right to Cultural Life and the Arts
- 2023
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Ingår i: The Rights of the Child. - : Brill Nijhoff. - 9789004511163 ; , s. 184-199
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The CRC is said to be read as a whole, but each article might be scrutinized separately to see in what ways it generates important matters for fulfilling children’s rights. In this chapter I suggest that the interpretation of Article 31 – the child’s right to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities, and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts – can go further than the CRC Committee (2013), which stresses the importance of the article by referring to the child’s development, socialization and learning for the future. Using the concepts of epistemic justice and encounters, the right to arts and cultural life is here discussed as rights that cannot fully be defined by only the duty-bearers. To accomplish the imperatives of Article 31, it is crucial to involve children’s own thoughts of what is meaningful and important: what is challenging, or enchanting, has to be understood from the perspective of the experiencing person. If the child is seen as an agent, co-constructing the social world, the right to cultural life and to arts opens up for accentuating the similarities between children and adults, both sharing curiosity and moments of “wonder-at-the-world” (Bennett, 2001).
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| 7. |
- Lindblom, Lars, 1971-
(författare)
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Distributive Justice for Children
- 2023
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Ingår i: The Rights of the Child: Legal and Ethical Challenges. - Leiden : Brill. - 9789004511156 ; , s. 166-179
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The debate on justice in philosophy revolves around two different problems. Roughly, the issue of retributive justice concerns the justification of punishment for crimes, whereas the problem of distributive justice has to do with who should get what goods. Large parts of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (crc) can be read as spelling out what rights, resources and support children should have access to. This chapter, then, concerns distributive justice. However, the problem of distributive justice tends to be conceptualized as a problem concerning adults. The social contract tradition in political philosophy is a case in point.1 It takes the problem of politics to be about a group of people who gather to come to an agreement about how they should live together. They set down the principles for this in a contract to which they all agree. Underlying this approach to justice are ideas of autonomy and, especially, responsibility. To be autonomous is to be self-governing. Usually, this ideal is set out in three assumptions. An autonomous agent is rational, informed, and not coerced.2 If the parties to the agreement were not autonomous and hence not able to govern themselves, then it would be difficult to see the point of the contract exercise. Such assumptions of autonomy run deep in political philosophy. One way of explaining what it is to be a child is to say that it is to be a person who has yet to develop autonomy.3 This is also what justifies giving children education. They have a need to become informed and to develop their capacity for rationality. Another way of thinking about childhood is that it is a period of vulnerability.4 If the autonomy of children is vulnerable, then it would be wrong to hold them accountable in the same way as autonomous adults. Both ideas of childhood point in the same direction: we should not hold children responsible the same way we do adults, and perhaps we should not hold children responsible at all in this regard. This is not because children would be in some sense worse off than adults, but because they are different in a morally relevant way.5 In this chapter, I will investigate what happens to theories of justice if children and related ideas of responsibility are taken seriously.6 In particular, I will look at issues of equality of education through this lens. In order to have an account of distributive justice, one needs to define both a principle of distribution and a metric of justice.7 A principle of distributive justice specifies how things should be distributed. One example is the principle of strict equality – that each person should have an equal amount of what is valuable – but, somewhat surprisingly, equality has been understood in several different ways in recent literature. Some have suggested that justice is about each person having a sufficient but not necessarily equal amount of what is valuable.8 Others have proposed that equality should be understood as responsibility-catering, so that a just distribution tracks responsibility where appropriate.9 Another approach starts from the observation that we could care about equality either because we find it important that each person gets an equal share or because we care about the situation of those who are worst off.10 A prioritarian principle of justice then says that justice demands the distribution that is most beneficial to the least fortunate, even if this distribution is unequal. In this chapter, however, we will not focus on this question,11 but will instead investigate a set of topics that are more directly connected to how childhood may affect an account of justice. In particular, we will focus on the metric of justice. This is an account of the goods with which the theory of justice is concerned. If we say e.g. that justice has to do with equality, then we must ask: equality of what? In the next section, we investigate how the assumption of responsibility and taking childhood seriously affect what this metric might be. Our answers there will have impact on other aspects of the theory of justice. Section three addresses the topic of time and justice; if the metric of justice involves goods that are only or especially valuable in childhood, then it seems that some costs in terms of such a metric cannot be compensated for in adulthood. Section 4 applies a distinction regarding approaches to justice – usually found in debates about economic policy – to the issue of education. Redistribution is where resources are redeployed to help out people who find themselves in a problematic situation, whereas pre-distribution is the idea that we should ensure that people have sufficient resources to avoid problematic situations. The final section investigates whether there might be several different problems of justice, so that, for instance, one principle might be appropriate for the sphere of healthcare while some other rule may be more to the point for education. The chapter also sums up an account of distributive justice which takes children seriously by saying that the fundamental problem of justice is how to organize the main social institutions so that they cohere into a single, just system of social cooperation. This means, importantly, that e.g. the education system should be understood as working together with other important institutions like the family and the labour market. It means also that the institution of education may run on one principle of justice, but that the appropriate principle of justice for teachers may be another.
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