Politics of childhood, childrens rights, and intergenerational relations

Abstract

One of the more decisive questions in the discussion of human living conditions, which then also produces the most diverse answers, concerns the relation between violence and civilization. In this context the treatment of childhood and of childrens rights is a crucial issue of this century. We live in a period of socialism, the womens movement, intercourse, individualism. Are we not entering the period of youth? (Benjamin 1991, p. 9), asked Walter Benjamin 80 years ago, shortly after Ellen Key had program-matically declared The Century of the Child (Key 1978). Aries, in his history of childhood and family life in the Ancien Regime, investigated the generalization of social control and subsequent new forms of intervention into social relations (Aries 1978, pp. 556–8). They concern: