Peer-reviewed article
A Lexicon for Research on International Children’s Rights in Troubled Times
Laura Lundy ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This is a theoretical essay about how children's rights discourse is being weakened or diluted in academic and policy contexts. The author critiques scholars who deny that children can be rights-holders and describes this as 'child rights lite'. The piece discusses conceptual challenges in children's rights theory rather than evaluating any intervention or program affecting children's well-being.
Key points
- Some academics reject the concept of children's rights despite legal commitments from UN member states
- The author identifies a problem of 'child rights lite' - a dilution or substitution of children's rights discourse
- There is reluctance in some academic communities to accept children as rights-holders
Limitations
This is a conceptual and theoretical discussion about academic discourse on children's rights rather than an empirical study. It does not evaluate the actual well-being outcomes for children or test any intervention.
Abstract
Human rights are under fire right across the world, not just from those who wish to avoid them but also from within the academic community, with many scholars challenging their value and efficacy.Informed criticism of this nature is healthy and welcome in any discipline.It is also not new to those who work in the field or pursue scholarship on children's rights: the question of whether children (can) have rights has been the subject of on-going discussion in legal theory (see, for example, Neil MacCormick's (1976) seminal article using children's rights as a "test case" for rights more generally) as have critiques of the content, meaning and efficacy of the human rights of children.However, I was recently told about a senior academic declaring to a post-doctoral researcher that he/she did not "believe" in children's rights as if the rights were somehow akin to the tooth fairy.A few years ago, a US scholar told me that he/she was a "parentalist" in much the same vein -a denial that children could and should be rights-holders.While that, of course, ignores the legal facts (and the public commitment of every United Nations member state, including the United States which has ratified two of the crc's Optional Protocols), it is indicative of a wider problem: it appears to be perfectly acceptable to deny that children are, should or can be rights-holders when there are very few who would publicly assert that they do not "believe" in human rights.The problem for child rights advocates and the academy community, as I see it, is that the reluctance of some to accept the notion that children have rights has generated a revised or alternative lexicon for talking about children's rights that is increasingly problematic.In short, child rights discourse is being substituted, truncated and diluted to a status that I have previously dubbed, child rights "lite" (Lundy, 2014).Discourses of children's rights have emerged that have the potential to undermine not just practice but scholarship and I am taking the opportunity Downloaded from Brill.