ABSTRACT
It is sometimes said that children’s rights are human rights, but this formulation leaves aside the problem of what is assumed to constitute the ‘human’ in human rights in the first place, a problem that has bedeviled the rights of many groups over history such as women, racialized minorities, the poor, and the colonized. An important question for critical children’s rights is not just how children’s rights are human rights, but also, in an opposed sense, how human rights are children’s rights, that is, how human rights themselves can be more inclusively understood and practiced. This chapter responds to this problem in contemporary normative assumptions around human rights using the approach of childism – analogous to approaches from feminism, critical race theory, and decolonialism – to explore how the human rights movement has imported anti-child or adultistic biases and how, in response, it is possible to reconstruct ideas and practices of human rights in critical ways that are inclusive, not only of gender, race, class, and the like but also, specifically and distinctly, of age. The result is a childist reconceptualization of human rights as complex interdependent mechanisms for social empowerment.
