The Story of Childhood Read Free Page B

others or adult authority. There is a common assumption that children will run wild given the chance, and that parents must keep control at all costs.
    Many adults nowadays believe that children already have too many rights, perhaps because they confuse rights withconsumerism and pester-power. But acquiring expensive designer clothes or state-of-the-art technology is not the same as having rights. Adults fear that children’s rights mean refusing to go to bed at a reasonable hour, demanding extortionate pocket money, and divorcing their parents if they don’t give them what they want. It is assumed that children will not make rational choices if they are allowed to make decisions.
    But this is to misunderstand how children’s rights might operate in practice. Children’s citizenship looks different from that of adults. The fact that ten-year-olds head households in Rwanda is beside the point – because children
can
doesn’t necessarily mean children
should
.
    Of course parents and the State are often best-placed to make decisions for children. But the fear that giving children rights will deprive them of their childhoods, or create a generation of mini-militants grabbing what they can from the diminishing pot of adult power, is based on a fundamental misconception about what growing up is really like.
    It suggests that childhood is a time free of challenge or difficulty, when rights are unnecessary and would only be used for petty personal gain. As Mary John, a developmental psychologist renowned for her work on children’s rights, argues: ‘One of the persisting myths is that childhood is somehow stress-free – that children are learning and growing rather than enduring and surviving … Maybe such myths serve to order and control in our minds what is mysterious and possibly threatening about the presence among us not of “unpeople”, as some might wish them to be, but of sentient beings – witnesses to much of the futility and anarchy of adult lives.’
    John believes that for the child to be considered a powerful member of society, she must first be recognised as a personrather than a person in the making. But if children are no longer to be seen as raw material, shaped by adults into social conformity and obedience, then ‘the question arises as to what sort of person and what role does that little person occupy relative to us.’ The place of both adults and children in society must be re-imagined.
    It is not difficult to make the case that children’s rights are poorly served in the UK. Children are the only members of British society who can, by law, be hit – perhaps the most vivid exemplar of this country’s failure to treat all children with the respect they are due. A defendant not old enough to buy a hamster legally can be tried in an adult court and named and shamed in newspapers, in direct contravention of their internationally recognised human rights.
    In the school summer holidays of 2005, for example, over 70 per cent of children in England and Wales were subject to curfew orders that allow the police to send people under sixteen home if they are on the streets after 9 p.m. without a supervising adult. Although the government has committed itself to the elimination of child poverty, the numbers of children growing up without warm beds or hot meals remains utterly unacceptable. And, less immediately, adults could be argued to be depriving children, and their children’s children, of the right to a future, as they bequeath them a planet on the brink of environmental collapse.
    In June 2005, a report by the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gils Robles condemned the British government for its record on supporting children, expressing particular concerns about the UK’s low age of criminal responsibility, the high numbers of children in custody, and the detention of asylum-seeking children. He reserved his most