Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods

Nathalie op de Beeck

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030321468
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, we are grappling with the legacies

of past centuries and their cascading effects upon children and all people. We

realize anew how imperialism, globalization, industrialization, and revolution

continue to reshape our world and that of new generations. At a volatile moment,

this collection asks how twenty-first century literature and related media

represent and shape the contemporary child, childhood, and youth.

Because literary representations construct ideal childhoods as well as model the

rights, privileges, and respect afforded to actual young people, this collection

surveys examples from popular culture and from scholarly practice. Chapters

investigate the human rights of children in literature and international policy; the

potential subjective agency and power of the child; the role models proposed for

young people; the diverse identities children embody and encounter; and the

environmental well-being of future human and nonhuman generations.

As a snapshot of our developing historical moment, this collection identifies

emergent trends, considers theories and critiques of childhood and literature,

and observes how new technologies and paradigms are destabilizing past

conventions of storytelling and lived experience.

Part IChildren’s Rights and Role Models

© The Author(s) 2020

N. op de Beeck (ed.)Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century ChildhoodsLiterary Cultures and Childhoodshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32146-8_2

Begin Abstract

Children’s Right to Participate: Insights from the Story of Malala

Jonathan Todres¹

(1)

Georgia State University College of Law, Atlanta, GA, USA

Jonathan Todres

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

The right to participate is arguably the most progressive right in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the foremost treaty on children’s rights. The Convention, or CRC, requires that states “assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child” (CRC , Article 12). And it mandates that the child’s views must be “given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child” (ibid.). Recognition of the right to participate requires a shift in how we both understand and treat children. It means moving from viewing children solely as subsumed within the family, where they are “seen and not heard,” to appreciating children as actors with agency, capable of contributing to decisions about children’s lives.¹ This chapter outlines children’s participation rights, discusses the story of Malala Yousafzai—both her lived experience and literary depictions of her life—and considers the broader implications of her story in children’s literature and children’s rights.

Adopted in 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child turned 11 years old at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Today, despite the Convention long having reached “adulthood,” many of the rights in the Convention remain works-in-progress (Wall ). The reasons are varied; in some countries, governments actively repress children’s rights, while in others, they are largely indifferent. And in still other nations, well-intentioned actors—from policymakers to parents—struggle to figure out how to operationalize certain rights including the right to participate (United Nations Committee, General Comment 5). Yet despite this patchwork implementation of the CRC, its inclusion of participation rights represents a powerful, and empowered, vision of children. In fact, the CRC includes several provisions for subjective agency and expression that had been absent from earlier, more protection-oriented children’s rights documents including the 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child. These participation rights—referred to in Articles 12, 13, 14, 15, and 17 of the CRC—indicate a changing understanding of the child that has continued since the late 1980s.

As the twentieth century bore witness to the birth of the modern international human rights movement, the latter part of the century saw the expansion of the human rights idea to include individuals and populations previously thought of as subordinate—for example, women, minorities, persons with disabilities, children, and others. The twenty-first century then confronts the challenge of making rights meaningful in the lives of all individuals, including those who are under 18 years of age and frequently denied the rights that attach to “adult” individuals.

The right to participate² is not only foundational for developing engaged citizens who can support a democracy, but it is also critical to realizing other rights. Providing opportunities for children to participate and be heard has been shown to produce positive outcomes in education, health care, juvenile justice proceedings, and other areas (see Todres and Higinbotham 2016). Perhaps more fundamentally, participation has an expressive function; it is an assertion of an individual’s personhood. And children, today as much as ever, are voicing a desire to be heard and to be acknowledged as individuals in their own right.

Human rights law, and in particular children’s rights law, establishes that children have a right to be heard and to have their opinions given fair consideration. Yet human rights law, and even law more generally, is often removed from the daily lives of individuals. Only a tiny percentage of the population studies human rights law. Children’s literature, however, exists in children’s lives and offers them creative worlds in which to explore and confront human rights themes. As Ian Ward explains in his book Law and Literature, in which he explores the potential of literature to educate about the law: “[o]nly a tiny minority of the community will ever study law after the ages of around 18 or 19, but the vast majority who encounter a reasonably wide spectrum of children’s literature will already have engaged in the jurisprudential debate” (Ward , 118). Thus, children’s literature can make law, including human rights, more accessible (Ward , ibid.). It can provide children and adolescents a space to explore and engage with complex issues of rights and responsibilities and the meaning of participation, and that early engagement may develop into a deeper comprehension of human rights for the twenty-first century.

Participation as Foundational to Personhood

In everyday life, children of all ages express their views to their parents, teachers, and others in their community. They ask to be heard and to have their views considered thoughtfully. Any parent or teacher can tell you how often children attempt to exercise their right to be heard. These moments are part of growing up and practice for developing a more robust sense of a child’s right to participate in his or her community and nation.

In the human rights context, the concept of participation encompasses a range of rights, including freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association, and the right to vote, among others. Traditional notions of childhood viewed children as subsumed within the family, with limited if any participation rights. It was presumed that parents would represent the child’s interests in the community and in the nation, and indeed even present-day documents place great power in the family as an institution. The CRC itself emphasizes the importance of the family, referring to it as “the fundamental group of society and the natural environment for the growth and well-being of all its members and particularly children” (CRC , Preamble). And, for children to realize the full range of their rights, including their right to participate, having parents or caregivers that nurture and support those rights is critical.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child and children’s rights more generally challenge the idea that children are solely appendages of the family. While acknowledging the critical role of parents and the family in the development of the child, the Convention also insists on recognition of children as individuals in their own right (CRC , Preamble). In short, from a children’s rights perspective, agency and the need for protection are not mutually exclusive (see James 2011). The Convention reflects both ideas, emphasizing the essential role that parents and families play in the lives of children and establishing that children have a distinct right to be heard.³

As noted in the Introduction, the core of children’s participation rights is found in Article 12 of the Convention, which provides that:

States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child. (CRC , Article 12)

There are four critical aspects of this right.

First, the child’s right to be heard applies to “all matters affecting the child.” Therefore, even though subsection 2 of Article 12 provides that a child “shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child,” the first requirement of Article 12 is not limited to judicial proceedings. In other words, Article 12 is not merely about giving children a say in custody proceedings in family court, for example, but rather it means ensuring that children have meaningful opportunities to participate in all decisions that affect their lives. Indeed, in answering the threshold question of which matters affect a child, children’s own views should inform that determination. As Laura Lundy writes, “The obvious starting point would be to ask children themselves whether the matter affects them” (Lundy , 931).

Second, this right belongs to every child “capable of forming his or her own views.” As the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has stated, there is no minimum age for the right to express one’s views and the burden should not be put on the child to prove he or she is capable of expressing a view (United Nations Committee, General Comment 12). The default position must be that children are capable of expressing their views. Further, as Lundy explains, “Children’s right to expr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Literary Cultures and Twenty-First-Century Childhoods
• Part I. Children’s Rights and Role Models
• Part II. Social Justice and Diversitydiversity in Literature for Young Readersgenreyoung readers
• Part III. Representing Youth, Claiming Identity, and Exercising Agency
• Part IV. Coming of Age in the Anthropocene
• Back Matter