ABSTRACT
Acknowledgement of children as individuals and therefore with rights to life, dignity and respect is a very new phenomenon. Indeed, it could be argued that we have yet to accept it to its fullest extent. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) presumably had to spell it out because it could not be assumed. The contrasting idea, that children are primarily extensions of their parents, part of their ‘goods and chattels’, has a rather longer history. Children have traditionally been seen as disposable assets whose ‘ownership’ might be the subject of dispute, much like property. In the context of divorce, for example, it took until the Children Act 1989 to try to change our thinking into something more child centred, though there is ample evidence that, even now, solicitors, courts and parents still see children as essentially something to be argued over rather than as persons to be valued.
