This summary is about Barnes's article: A genealogy of the CRC. This article is exam material for the subject: In the best interest of the child from the master orthopedagogy of the University of Groningen.
Introduction
The underlying rationale in human rights documents is that ‘everyone is entitled to all the rights and
freedoms’ within human rights conventions. Nonetheless, the way in which the United Nations
Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) depicts (afbeeldt) childhood and a range of children’s
issues excludes a vast swatch of children in both the developing and developed world. The CRC
embraces a particular version of childhood, which stigmatizes children that do and do not live up to
the CRC’s normative framework. The CRC was drafted with a particular type of childhood in mind,
and treats children outside this model as marginal.
Lessons learned from critiques of the CRC as excluding the non-western child
Two main arguments:
1. Some argue that the notion of rights, including children rights, is based upon Western notions of
liberty. This viewpoint has been critiques as un-nuanced and over reliant (te afhankelijk) on the
Western-non-Western binaries.
2. The CRC’s normative vision for childhood is Western, that there is a model of childhood that is
universally applicable, that there are universal needs, and that there exists a consensus (both
domestically and internationally) over how to realize those needs.
In this article three critics of the CRC’s vision for childhood are explored here:
1. The CRC makes the fundamental assumption that childhood is a universal state of development.
In particular the more conservative strains of the developmental psychology, monopolized and
solidified irrefutable truths about childhood by presenting them as natural facts. The CRC fails to
recognize the category child as a social construct. Instead the CRC universalizes the child-as-
developing. The CRC further naturalizes the Western conception of the childhood developmental
period, by institutionalizing a particular Western version of childhood in an international human
rights convention. The international law promulgated (afgekondigd) by the CRC facilitates
childhood development, enabling the further deployment of the truth of childhood as a period of
development. Developmental psychology, the foundation of international policy, which informs
right of the child discourse, is anything but neutral. In fact, it is highly political. For example: the
beginning of life and therefore the beginning of childhood, whether they began in utero, was
hotly debated during the drafting of the Convention. There is an imperceptible (onmerkbare)
shift from the naturalization of childhood as a state of development to the globalization of that
development in the CRC. The child-as-developing concept was made the universal norm for
childhood in the CRC, yet there was no discussion of this concept in the negotiations that led to
the CRC. Quite possibly, childhood, as a period of development, was to obvious a truth to
necessitate discussion.
2. The truth that children are developing rationalizes the child’s dependence on adults.
By constructing the child as immature and developing, the CRC largely envisions the child as
lacking capacity/agency. The CRC envisions the child primarily as objects or victims. Section II in
the CRC explores how children must be dependent on adults and the family in order to realize
certain rights. At most, immaturity requires total relinquishment of certain rights, such as the
right to work. Section II also examines the instances where the CRC privileged the protection of
the child not through empowering children, but by making the child an object of care. The child’s
right to rest, leisure and play (article 31(1)) also invokes a picture of a carefree existence with
limited labor. This regulation of child labor stigmatizes certain societies that factor in the child’s
economic contribution to the family.
, 3. The CRC implies a certain normative arrangement for how that dependence should take place.
The CRC implies that biologically based relations between parents and children ‘are more
fundamental and natural than other sorts of family or community relations.’ Again the CRC
stigmatizes societies where such arrangements are not the norm. Western societies views
childhood in other cultures through binaries, characterising parts of childhood in other cultures
as alternatively: undesirable and requiring reform or desirable and thus ignorable. This binary
involves the good/Apollonia child vs the bad/Dionysian child. To rectify the undesirable aspects
of childhood, various scholarly disciplines (development psychology, labor studies, medicine, law
and so on) compete for intervention, claiming that each alone has a solution. This dichotomy
marginalizes and stigmatizes the everyday life of a vast majority of children.
These critiques of the CRC’s universalist approaching on the argument that the CRC has limited
applicability in the Global South. Exportation and globalization of a singular view of childhood
from advanced Western capitalist societies can have a serious impact on the lives of children in
developing countries.
It seems that while het CRC’s vison of the category ‘child’ is argued to have limited applicability to the
Global South, there is consensus that the ‘child’, along with the perception of the adult and the state
as responsible and capable, is fully applicable to the West. Naturally, with this position, critique of
the exclusionary effect of the Convention seems to focus on the non-Western world. It is unfortunate
that there is little critical engagement regarding the ways in which the vison of the category ‘child’ in
the CRC is exclusive, even in the West. The inapplicability of the CRC’s Western envisioning of the
child to actual children in the West, strengthens the credibility of critiques. The binaries:
undesirable/desirable childhood proves useful in making the same critiques of the Western world.
These binaries, found through the Convention, result in certain children and parents being labelled
undesirable (thus in need of intervention) while deeming other desirable parenting units above
intervention.
North-South-East-West: The expulsion of certain childhoods from the international discourse on
children’s rights
Quite possibly, the vast experience of children throughout the world cannot be conceptualized in one
Convention. The question of ‘what is a child’ is continually dismissed as either an academic luxury or
a question already adequately answered.
By privileging the family, state and even culture, the CRC often makes an explicit choice to underline,
rather than undermine, the unique forms of vulnerability proscribed to childhood. By casting the
parent and state as responsible, and the family, culture, and traditions as happy and safe, the CRC
fails to be helpful and applicable to many of those who the CRC categorizes as a ‘child’, yet fail to
experience the family, culture, traditions, parents and the state in these ways. In other words, the
CRC reflects social norms that provide little help to vulnerable children. The CRC’s vision of the child
as ‘developing’ and thus rightfully dependent upon adults fails to mainstream certain issues of
children existing inside and outside the CRC’s normative framework.
Child as head of the household
The Convention defines the family as a child in care of a responsible adult, thereby excluding
childhoods where the child is responsible for the parent, for her or himself and/or for other children.
There are many references in the CRC to the forms of care necessary to protect the child. Care
appears to be a fundamental right of the child in the CRC.
The Convention does not just mandate the child to the family context. It also delineates (schetst) the
family structure by situating the child as dependent on the parent for the child’s everyday physical
needs. The child is required to attend school under article 28 and is not envisioned by the CRC as
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