ABSTRACT
In 1973, Hillary Rodham Clinton argued that, ‘The phrase children’s rights is a slogan in search of a definition’. This oft repeated claim was challenged by Hodgson (an Australian legal scholar) who argued that decades of attention to the rights of children led by the United Nations (UN) have rendered Clinton’s phrase obsolete (Hodgson 2009). Yet he also lamented the failure of many governments to create mechanisms that allow for enactment of the duties enshrined within the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (UN 1989) such that there exists in policy and practice a superficial ‘lip service’ (Kiersey 2011), reflecting a ‘child rights veneer’ (Jones and Welch 2010). This inattention to rights per se and to creating a coherent definition for, or from, policy and practice may be due to numerous political, legal and sociocultural debates and disagreements about childhood, about human rights and about their intersections. Although these debates frequently consider conceptions of childhood (and adulthood) and the ways that socially and culturally constructed understandings of young humans intersect with constructions of moral obligations and legal rights, the ontological basis for disagreements is rarely conveyed explicitly. Yet ontology, which concerns beliefs about the nature of being, has infused rights talk with divergent perspectives and epistemological claims that manifest in a range of theories and practices. It is argued that a reconstructed philosophy of childhood is needed to help inform discussions of children’s rights, drawing on postmodern theories that reject ‘ahistorical, apolitical and psychologized’ accounts (Peters and Johansson 2012: 2).
