Do children’s rights advocates sometimes risk perpetuating the problems we're trying to solve?
I think it is a safe assumption that most of us who are children’s rights researchers care about injustice. We are drawn to the work because we see an injustice and we want to help correct it. We see children’s rights frameworks as a tool to do that, so we dedicate ourselves to learning about them, interrogating them and using them to advance the wellbeing, interests and voices of children, all in the hope of rectifying those injustices.
That was certainly my route into children’s rights research. The majority of my career since finishing university has been working within the New Zealand child protection system. That system is designed to support some of the most marginalised children in the country, and I saw children’s rights frameworks as a tool to ensure they were better served by our child protection agencies, our government and our society more broadly. In particular I saw the potential of Article 12 of the Convention, which gives children the right to have their views taken into account in decisions which affect them, as the potential to be a game-changer. I believed we could use Article 12 to elevate children’s voices by forcing the government to listen and, crucially, take into account what children have to say.
I still believe that listening to children’s voices is crucial. Children regularly report feeling isolated and ignored by adults, as though their views don’t matter. In the child protection context, where the stakes are high, emotions are heightened and the adults responsible for hearing children’s voices are overworked and under-supported, the risk that children won’t be listened to is even greater. I whole-heartedly support efforts to remedy that injustice.
But child protection is complicated. In New Zealand, the vast majority (69% as of June 2019) of children in state care are Māori (the indigenous people of New Zealand) despite Māori making up about 15% of the population. The parents of those children are disproportionately likely to be poor and disproportionately likely to have been in care themselves. Recent research found that children in families from the most economically deprived decile are a staggering 35 times more likely to be referred to New Zealand’s child protection agency for a family group conference.
These wider issues mean we need to take a broader approach to child rights in this context. The families of children in care are disproportionately indigenous, disproportionately poor and disproportionately likely to have been in state care themselves. The marginalisation of children in this context is one injustice within a wider set of injustices. We must not ignore the problems faced by children, but if we use child rights frameworks to advance children’s interests at the cost of their families, could we risk perpetuating those broader problems?
The problems faced by Māori children in this context illustrate the issue. A major reason Māori are overrepresented in child protection statistics in New Zealand is colonisation. One aspect of colonisation in New Zealand was the deliberate destruction by the state of Māori social structures. For example, the institution of whānau (translated as ‘family’ but having a broader definition than ‘nuclear family’) was central to Māori society prior to the 19th century, but over time the centrality of that institution has been eroded, contributing to many of the problems facing Māori today. Because of this history, the rebuilding of whānau structures is the one of the most important and urgent tasks in ensuring Māori children are safe and well looked after. Taking a wider view of the problem puts the issues faced by Māori children in a different light.
Although I still believe in the substance of children’s rights, I have begun to doubt whether children’s rights frameworks may not always be the best tool to deal with those broader problems. The rights enshrined by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child are individual rights, not collective ones. They do include rights relating to family (Articles 5, 9, 10 and 18) and to culture (Article 30), but these rights are still largely framed in terms of individual children. They are not truly collective rights. The broader changes address the issues discussed above lie to bigger structural shifts, such as the rebuilding of whānau structures as part of decolonisation efforts. I don’t think an individual rights-based approach will be sufficient to achieve those wider objectives.
There are other tools which may often be more effective. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples might be a tool to use in tandem with the Convention on the Rights of the Child to better advance the interests of indigenous children. Indigenous peoples around the world will have their own tools to advance such interests. In New Zealand, for example, tikanga Māori (Māori laws and values) is something which can be used to uphold the rights of Māori children and families. The use of these tools is crucial, not just for the substantive interests they help promote, but for what they add to broader efforts by Indigenous Peoples to reassert their sovereignty and self-determination.
None of this is to suggest that we should discard children’s rights frameworks entirely. The fact that children remain marginalised and ignored by adults, in the child protection system and society more broadly, is still a major injustice which needs rectifying. But I believe that as children’s rights advocates we need to adopt a broad and critical perspective if we want to avoid addressing one injustice but perpetuating another. This is not just about the rights of indigenous children in state care, these broader issues are likely to be present to some degree in many different settings. In our advocacy for children we must therefore always ask ourselves whether children’s rights frameworks are the right tool for the job. Often they may be, but we need to think critically about whether that is always the case.
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