3 - Global Children’s Rights Discourses: Imperialistic, Irrelevant and Inapplicable to Southern Contexts?

Summary

Introduction

The association between dominant children's rights discourses and developments which took place in Western Europe and North America from the 18th century onwards has been at the forefront of debates about children's rights certainly in the past 100 years. This linkage has provided the foundation for much discussion about the children's rights movement and its attendant global policies and laws such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In particular, the Western European and North American origins of dominant children's rights discourses have resulted in the proliferation of publications that have sought to show that the conceptualizations of childhoods, child development, child protection and children's entitlements that are currently being diffused through a range of international policies and legal frameworks as well as programmatic interventions to countries around the world are based on the upheavals of Western European and North American societies from the 17th century onwards. As a result, it is claimed, they are at odds with the understanding of childhood and child development in contexts which have, historically, had different ideas about the nature of childhood, the roles of children and the very essence of what it means to be human (see Burman, 1994, 1996, 1999; Boyden, 1997; Aitken, 2001; Pupavac, 2001; Burr, 2002; de Waal, 2002; Ansell, 2010; Cregan and Cuthbert, 2014; Wells, 2015).

That these policies and discourses have had an impact is evident by the fact that they are now increasingly used to frame discourses around child wellbeing, welfare and interests in a range of countries whose historical trajectories are not necessarily similar to those of Western Europe and North America (Burman, 1996, 1999; Boyden, 1997; Aitken, 2001; Harris- Short, 2001; Pupavac, 2001; Burr, 2002; de Waal, 2002; Balagopalan, 2014; Liebel, 2020). This has been pointed out by other scholars; Burr, in reference to Boyden (1990), makes the following point: ‘What Boyden (1990) has called the global model of childhood, dominated by modern western understanding of children, has set in motion an international agenda that makes it problematic for children to work or to show a level of independence that is now deemed inappropriate in the West’ (Burr, 2002: 53; see also Burman, 1999).