ABSTRACT
The concept of children’s rights tends to conjure up a mixed bag of images and reactions. These images and reactions include anxiety produced by highprofile cases such as the Florida boy Gregory Kingsley’s attempt in 1992 to “divorce” his natural/ biological parents as well as sympathy stimulated by the sight of eight-year-old child laborers in India shackled to their weaving looms. Some regard children’s rights as having something to do with protecting and providing for children, while others fear that children’s rights is a corrosive challenge to the rights of parents and the privacy of the family. To navigate through the mixed bag of images and reactions, it is useful to answer several questions. What is a “child”? What is a “right”? What are “children’s rights”?
