Child Protection in an Interconnected World: Integrating Ideals and Cooperating With a Common Purpose

Abstract

This book covers a range of topics crucial to child development and wellbeing. Each chapter is centered around a theme, which is related to but distinct from themes in other chapters. Within each chapter, the reader will find review and analysis of legal and sociological literature, from international conventions to statutes, cases, and academic articles. Examination of such breadth of sources helps us make objective evaluation of issues. Results of these inquiries are formatted as suggestions and recommendations directed toward numerous stakeholders in children’s lives, including legal professionals, educators, doctors, and parents. Overall, this study aims to discover problem areas in application and enforcement of children’s rights, and offer pragmatic solutions that can be implemented to enhance the lives of children. The research is primarily qualitative literature review and analyses, supported with quantitative statistical analysis. Natural law theories and legal positivism are incorporated with the intent of affirming application of existing positive law while also calling for increased, revised, and improved lex scripta in order to create and enforce children’s rights at the local level. Natural law theories are not used in attempts to invalidate lex lata as is usually the case. Rather than relying on the natural law axiom that “an unjust law is not a law”, natural law theories are applied in this book using the assumption that absence of just law is unjust law. Bearing in mind general principles of international public law, especially that of territoriality, Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice is also used as a guide for prioritizing sources of law. Frequently, as we will find throughout this book, children’s rights are threatened by all three branches of government through ineffective legislation, inadequate policing, and insufficient adjudication. Corruption and low public funding are consistent obstacles to improving state intervention. We can mitigate this problem through focusing on the 3P’s strategy: Prevention, Protection for victims, and Punishment for offenders. Prevention relies heavily on individual, family, and community volunteer support. Crime rates and totals are reduced through prevention, which is ultimately the goal. States support civilian efforts by protecting victims’ rights, and later by prosecuting and sentencing offenders, but prevention requires more intrinsic sociocultural change. Such fundamental changes in the way people live together have been elusive throughout human history, and to a certain extent we must assume some behaviors cannot be eliminated. On this note, we shall find great insight and inspiration from the earliest pioneer of modern human rights theory, Eleanor Roosevelt, who said: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”