Agency versus Protection - The Debate Redux : Duncan Green / OXFAM UK

 

Article shared by Robert Cohen

When should we think of children as young people with agency vs potential victims of abuse?

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"Save the Kids funded me to write Hidden Lives, a book on child rights in Latin America and the Caribbean, for which I travelled round the region talking and listening to children in a range of difficult circumstances – working kids, street kids, indigenous and rural kids etc.

The prism for understanding what I heard was the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of Child, which argues that children should be seen as having agency, voice and rights, which progressively expand from infancy to the age of majority (18). It is a genuinely radical document, which had led to a wave of child rights legislation across the region, but which has since rather been forgotten."