ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the qualification of women and children as 'vulnerable' mostly as a background against which to focus on the degree to which this qualification is not applicable and on the extent to which it might hamper the protection of the human rights of women or children. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) proposes a new perception of a disability as something that is not a characteristic of a person, but that instead 'results from the interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers'. The chapter examines how this challenge is being addressed in the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) context, and will explore what this might mean for children's human rights. The coupling of 'women and children' in a context that emphasises an increased need for protection as compared to adult men was of course not invented by human rights law.
