Child-centred analysis of national immunisation laws – Australia as a case study

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper uses a child-centred approach to analyse Australia’s child immunisation laws. These laws condition enrolment to early education centres on the child being fully immunised and provide financial incentives to parents, encouraging them to comply with the national immunisation protocol. The paper seeks to contribute to the debates in public health about the utility of human rights and the definition of the ‘public’ by problematising the marginalisation of children from this space. Navigating between the positionalities of individuals and collectives in two terrains, namely, human rights and public health, the paper examines how children and their rights are conceptualised in the development of immunisation policies, and asks what these laws tell us about children’s positionality, lives and bodies in society. It argues that the current child immunisation laws commodify children’s bodies, physically and figuratively, as a means to protect the entire population from infectious diseases. This reproduces children and childhood as means to an end, seeing childhood as a vehicle to adulthood. Utilising a child-centred approach can advance a different approach to public health matters concerning children, safeguarding their rights in this domain and in turn changing their public visibility.