ABSTRACT

This chapter comprises a broad discussion of children's rights; it engages the debate over the relations of those rights to human rights discourses and practices in general, and it critiques the universality of those rights with a nod to different countries' contexts of child rights and advocacy development. The chapter weaves between early attempts to protect and make provisions for children, and efforts to create sustainable communities within which children could thrive. It looks at so-called 'child saving' movements and describes how those transformed into formal rights agendas. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child resulted in activists for children's rights moving in a direction that differed from those focusing on human rights, by converging on young people's participation in governance processes that were heretofore absent, as well as providing for basic needs and protection from harm.