Children’s Views on Children’s Rights: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Children’s rights are set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This systematic literature review aimed to investigate children’s views of children’s rights, at a broad level. Nine papers were included, from a range of countries and contexts. They all accessed the views of children and young people (aged up to 18 years). A content analysis was carried out using a recursive process of hybrid aggregative-configurative synthesis, and themes within children’s views and factors that may affect these were identified. These were ‘awareness of rights’, ‘value placed on (importance of) rights’, ‘impact of having/not having rights fulfilled’, ‘realisation and respect of rights’, ‘equality of rights’, ‘identifying and categorising of rights’, and ‘factors that may affect children’s views’. These were developed into a progression of rights realisation and implications for practice and further research were considered.