Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I How to Understand Childhoods in the Postcolonial Context
- Part II Children Under Colonial and Postcolonial Rule
- Part III Children’s Rights and the Decolonization of Childhoods
- Epilogue: Childhoods and Children’s Rights Beyond Postcolonial Paternalism
- References
- Index
7 - Postcolonial Dilemmas of Children’s Rights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I How to Understand Childhoods in the Postcolonial Context
- Part II Children Under Colonial and Postcolonial Rule
- Part III Children’s Rights and the Decolonization of Childhoods
- Epilogue: Childhoods and Children’s Rights Beyond Postcolonial Paternalism
- References
- Index
Summary
The fact that there is no guaranteed universality of human rights but only a process of their universalization, has consequences for how every conception of human rights must understand itself and must act towards itself: it must undergo a permanent self-criticism. (Christoph Menke and Arnd Pollmann, Philosophie der Menschenrechte, 2007: 85)
White people think of themselves as white and without a race, just as men (and often women) consider gender to be an issue for women. The claim of unsituatedness is made by and on behalf of those with power. To the extent the Convention [on the Rights of the Child] deals with children as unspecified, unsituated people, it tends in fact to deal with white, male, and relatively privileged children. (Frances Olsen, ‘Children's Rights: Some feminist approaches to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child’, 1995: 195)
Introduction
Whoever wants to deal with children and childhoods in the world today and wants to be clear about their universal rights must refer to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, the Convention). This international convention unanimously ratified by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989 and ratified by almost all states (with the exception of the US) is the culmination of a process that is based on the postulation of human rights in the European Enlightenment. It has also strongly influenced worldwide debates about what is suitable for children and what children are to be entitled to. In these debates, the Convention is by no means unanimously welcomed. In addition to those who question children's rights in general, reasoning that children are not capable of rational thinking, even children's rights advocates stand hold at least two opposing positions. While some consider the Convention as a ‘milestone’ on the way to a better childhood and only complain about its lacking implementation, the others see it as an imperial Eurocentric project that globalizes the Western notions of childhood despite cultural diversity and imposes it on the ‘rest of the world’.
This chapter is an attempt to go beyond these controversial positions and to arrive at a more differentiated assessment of children's rights. The construction of childhood, which is transported with the Convention, is undoubtedly of Western origin and can lead to ignore and misinterpret childhoods that do not correspond with this construction.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Decolonizing ChildhoodsFrom Exclusion to Dignity, pp. 127 - 160Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020