Manfred Liebel, ed., Children's Rights from Below: Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Abstract

Manfred Liebel, ed.: Children's Rights Below: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 272 pp. $87.00 hardcover (9780230302518) Significant international scholarship has recently emerged to theorize children's participatory rights. European scholar Manfred Liebel and his colleagues Karl Hanson, Ivan Saadi and Wouter Vandenhole contribute to this area by importantly conceptualizing children's rights from Drawing on sociology, political science, and socio-legal studies this thirteen chapter volume focuses primarily on majority world children on the margins. Assuming readers with a degree of familiarity with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and surrounding debates, Liebel and his fellow contributors are able to deeply explore the possibilities and challenges of acknowledging and fostering children's rights below. While advocacy for children's rights did not begin with the CRC, work in this area inevitably grapples with this significant convention. In articulating children's rights below, Liebel and his colleagues convey mixed feelings about the CRC. On the one hand, it is a modernist document which certain groups have used to enforce a narrow, Western ideal of childhood. It was conceived by adults and it suggests that rights are bestowed above. The CRC is also frequently undermined by state and global political and economic policies which hinder possibilities for children's rights. For instance, individualized legal rights do not always work well for children on the margins for whom rights are alien, and who believe that asking for rights shows weakness or invites reprisals. On the other hand the CRC is a flexible document which has incited significant interest in children's rights, and consequently the language of rights is emerging within children's organizing and demands. It is such children's organizing within the majority world that has most captured the attention of the authors of this book. Liebel and his colleagues draw on the sociology of childhood to counter the top-down, narrowing aspects of the CRC, arguing instead that children are actively and competently involved in what Liebel and Saadi discuss as transcendant innovations, or collective actions initiated below. This is what they mean by rights below, whether such participation is framed in the language of rights or not. This more localized rights work commonly emerges within contexts of marginalization and exclusion. A strength of this text is its use of many such examples of children who successfully participate and organize, including children in child headed households and in economic cooperatives. Particularly noted for discussion is the activism of working children's movements, an area most deeply explored in the chapter by Iven Saadi. Children in these movements are making their rights manifest and advocating new ones. They advocate for work, the right to choose to work, and the right to specific conditions of work, as well as for health care and education. Their more macro-level advocacy tends to arise in coalitions with adults, however, which in turn undermines their legitimacy with organizations such as the International Labour Organization as these children are then assumed to be manipulated by adults. Saadi counters that adult assistance is needed sometimes, e.g., in renting a space, but that it is the young people who are the leaders. There is tension, within the CRC and in broader discussions of children's rights, between protection and participation. Liebel and his colleagues grapple with this tension as they explore the possibilities and challenges of children's rights below. Much child advocacy work in the twentieth century has focused on children's protection and the provision of services. Those who embrace more participatory rights worry that provision and protection rights often foster only dependency and scrutiny while limiting freedom and undermining children's capacities. …