Kapwa child participation, kapwa childhood, and a path towards the indigenisation and expansion of international agreements

ABSTRACT

The Philippines has championed child participation from the drafting of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) to the creation of child participation structures in domestic and regional intergovernmental governance. This has been possible because the country has strong anchors that ground CRC in the country. We explore one such anchor, kapwa, a Filipino equivalent for the Western ‘other’ but means more as ‘shared self’ or ‘together with the person’ and identified as a core Filipino value and/or virtue ethics. Using a model of social ontology, we turn this anchor into a ground of child participation. In a kapwa ground, child participation expands from the communicative processes the CRC confines it to social engagements; from fixed and hierarchical child-adult roles to negotiated and interdependent roles. Kapwa child participation also gives way to a kapwa childhood construct that can integrate the diverse Filipino childhood constructs, a construct that acknowledges children’s vulnerability and need of protection as it acknowledges their equality with adults; children are simultaneously human beings and ‘becomings’. In this paper, we present a path, which other investigators or practitioners can follow, to domesticate and to develop alternative local discourses that could enhance global agreements.

KEYWORDS:

• Child participation
• childhood
• kapwa
• Philippines
• indigenous construct
• ASEAN

Author

Roberto S. Salva is a doctoral candidate in social policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, USA. His dissertation focuses on children’s development in their participation rights using mixed multilevel methods to look at the non/participation of students from newsletters of 850 randomly sampled middle and high schools across the US. In 2021, he led the design and process of the consultations of children and youth in 11 countries from Asia and the Pacific on Civil Registration and Vital Statistics in 2021. Before coming to the US for his PhD, he led the baseline study on child participation in the ASEAN and its ten member states; drafted guidelines on child participation for ACWC (ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children); peer reviewed the Philippine study on violence against children; and consulted for various non-profits including The Asia Foundation, Save the Children, and Consuelo Zobel Alger Foundation. Before that, he led a non-profit for the deaf in the Philippines for 6 years.

Acknowledgements

I wrote the earlier versions of this paper as Sol Chick and Rosalind B. Chaikin Endowed Fellow and Marjorie S. Trotter Doctoral Fellow (for which Ms. Courtney Lombardo has acted as middle person kindly) of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. I wish to thank Dr. Rajesh Sampath, who commented generously and extensively on the first draft of this paper, and Dr. Nina A. Kammerer, who critiqued the first version of the theoretical section. I thank this special issue’s editors, Drs. Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, Orna Naftali, and Lucia Rabello de Castro, for their generous comments on the earlier versions of this paper. Along with the journal, the editors worked to ensure that I get to see this paper published. And, no kidding, the two anonymous reviewers of this paper rock!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).