Session Information
25 SES 09, Problematising Concepts and Categories
Paper Session
Contribution
When rights for children are described and discussed, the different ‘kinds’ or ‘categories’ of rights are very often presented as provision rights, protection rights and participation rights. As the use of this categorisation is so widespread and accepted, the ‘rights categories’ can easily be referred to as the ‘3 p’s’. In this paper, I pay attention to and critically examine the use of provision, protection and participation to specify children’s rights. I argue that this conceptualisation has hampering effects on examinations and discussions in research in children’s rights.
One problem is that the provision-protection-participation model for specifying rights for children takes the form of the normal and real, and thus frames research on children’s rights in a way that directs the spotlight to certain questions and leaves other in the shadows. Another problem concerns the possibilities of attaining theoretically driven and profound analyses in research in children’s rights. In comparison with the terminology that is employed to discuss general human rights, and which I propose as a preferable vocabulary, provision, protection and participation largely lack theoretical foundation as rights terms.
The analysis presented in this paper draws on the insights of the linguistic turn that philosophical and societal problems are to a large extent questions of how language is used. With the basic assumption that the meaning and understanding of societal phenomena, such as children’s rights, are formed in and by language use, it is necessary to critically analyse the language that children’s rights is couched in. Accordingly, we need to examine what is indicated in children’s rights thinking as the 'real' and the 'normal' since this defines what everyone has to orient themselves towards.
Another starting point for the analysis is the relation between human rights and children’s rights. It is often pointed out that children’s rights are part of a broader human rights framework. Bobbio (1996) describes children’s rights as a step in the expansion of human rights during the last half century. Grover (2007) emphasises that children’s rights are indistinguishable from human rights generally, and that the rights articulated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child are the same human rights entitlements that apply to all persons. If so, it is unclear why different sets of words are so often used to describe, analyse and discuss human rights for children (provision, protection, participation) than human rights for adults (civil, political and social rights).
In the first section of the paper I trace and examine the emergence and use of provision, protection and participation to categorise children’s rights. Some significant changes in the meaning and use of these concepts over time will be highlighted. In the paper’s second section, I propose and elaborate on another language for constructing and analysing children’s rights. This is done by emphasising children’s rights as part of general human rights rather than as something specific. In the final section, I discuss the effects of the two vocabularies by highlighting some insights and possible consequences.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bobbio, N., The Age of Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press 1996). Hammarberg, T., “The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – and How to Make It Work”, Human Rights Quarterly 1990 (12(1)), 97-105. Lansdown, G., “Children’s Rights”, in B. Mayall (ed.) Children’s Childhoods: Observed and Experienced (London: RoutledgeFalmer 1994).
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