Children's Rights

Children's Rights Edited by Jude Fernando (Special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2001) The issues of child poverty and mistreatment occupy that strange no-man's land of discourse in the international community, simultaneously ever-present and peripheral. The abuse of children's rights -- through child labor, the use of children as combatants, and urban poverty -- strings through most discussions of globalization, economic development, democratization, refugee issues, and conflict. However, the on-the-ground realities of children's lives in the developing world are only incompletely understood, leading to the adoption of policies that are often grossly ineffective and culturally inappropriate. This disconnect is well reflected in international efforts to fight child labor. In several developing countries, the use of child labor has decreased substantially due to international pressure and the adoption of children's rights conventions. In most cases, well-intentioned regulations have resulted in a further erosion of children's living standards and the pushing of children into more informal and dangerous occupations. Within the international community, there now seems to be a greater appreciation of the lack of "fit" between local context and treaties negotiated at the international level. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the International Labour Organization's (ILO) Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (ILO Convention 182), both drafted to allow for greater flexibility for implementing countries, will ultimately be judged according to how well they remedy this lack of fit. In different ways, the two volumes under consideration here address themselves to this tension between the local and the international. The first examines the growing number of street children in the developing world, a commonly neglected aspect of the child labor debate. The authors ambitiously attempt both rich ethnographic description and a more abstract, policy-oriented analysis focused on general causes and cures. The second volume, a collection of articles, makes a case for a more nuanced and culturally-sensitive international strategy on children's rights. The number of street children in the urban centers of the developing world has exploded in the past two decades, and child homelessness has now spread to parts of Africa and Latin America where it had previously been uncommon. The root causes of this increase have yet to be adequately explained, and the ways in which street children live -- the social structures in which they are embedded, the coping mechanisms and strategies they develop -- remain similarly murky. Street Children in Kenya: Voices of Children in Search of a Childhood, co-authored by an American sociologist and two Kenyan social scientists, is not exactly the book its title might suggest. Kilbride, Suda and Njeru have included the ethnographic interviews one would expect, but they supplement in-depth informant testimony with small focus group discussions and a large-scale survey involving 400 of Nairobi's 10 thousand to 30 thousand street children. The excellent first two chapters lay out the authors' research design and offer a number of provocative hypotheses about why numbers of street children in Africa's cities have steadily increased. Later chapters haphazardly turn to Kenyan cultural traditions, survey findings, and short biographies of the authors' key informants; unfortunately, only in the final chapter do the authors return to the general questions laid out in the introduction. Unlike other books in this genre, the authors do make an effort to lay out policy implications and suggest improvements; however, these suggestions are quite general and do not take account of the constraints of the current African context. Kilbride, Suda and Njeru argue that the origins of rising numbers of street children lie in economic and social conditions that have brought about drastic changes in Kenyan cultural traditions and family structure. …