Child Rights without Substance? – Swedish Public Welfare and the Invisibility of Children in Economic Support Cases

• 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.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Juridik -- Juridik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Law -- Law (hsv//eng)

Keyword

rättsvetenskap med inriktning mot offentlig rätt

Legal Science, specialisation Public Law

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)