A Difference-Centred Alternative to Theorization of Children's Citizenship Rights

Abstract

The “rights revolution” has become a central feature of modern political consciousness and has resulted in a proliferation of theories about children's rights. Yet mainstream liberal theories in which children's rights are theorized rarely take children's rights as citizens seriously, due to the normative stance of liberal theories that construct children in terms of “not-yet-citizens”. This article argues for a difference-centred theory of children's citizenship rights by situating the analysis within feminist, anti-racist, gay, lesbian and transgendered theories of citizenship that are difference-centred. It discusses an alternative, difference-centred, articulation of children's citizenship rights through an analysis of their rights of liberty and equality. Through a broadening of liberal, normative notions of liberty defined around exercising individuated autonomous decision-making or the participation in citizenry duties, the article re-defines children's rights of liberty in relational terms that addresses their agency and acknowledges their presence as participating subjects in the multiple relationships in which they interact. It also re-articulates their rights of equality from a mainstream liberal interpretation of “equality-as-same” to one that treats children as “differently equal” members of the public culture in which they are full participants. Normative social institutional practices and assumptions become the focus of the analysis, which concludes that these have to change as they act as barriers that exclude and marginalize children's citizenship rights on the basis of their difference (real and constructed) from an adult norm assumed of citizens.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers, Ruth Lister, Sadru Jetha and Lena Dominelli for sharing their insights and providing me with feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

¹ See Freeman (1983, 1992, 1999); Goldstein et al. (1979, 1980); Flekkoy and Kaufman (1997); Franklin (1986); amongst many others.

² Not all social justice claims based on difference are seen as equally legitimate. As Mouffe (1993) suggests, only those difference-centred claims that are liberatory and address themselves to the emancipating of people's lives from oppression are seen as the basis for anti-racist feminist theorizations of citizenship rights.

³ I use the term keywords as defined by Raymond Williams (1976), where he describes how certain key concepts evolve through contestation and debate, as their meanings are continuously re-interpreted and reframed. He argues that conversations around key concepts constitute the basis for explaining the emergence of alternative definitions and theoretical frameworks. In a similar fashion, my analysis will centre on the conversations that arise around some key concepts between liberal and difference-centred discussions of citizenship rights.

⁴ I refer to the term children as representing a heterogeneous collectivity, which includes the entire spectrum of children from their infancy to the age of 18, that age which legally defines childhood in most societies.

⁵ Rawls (1971) envisions liberty to be the first and primary principles by which liberal democratic societies govern themselves as a socially just one. Equality is the second of these two principles and falls beneath the principle of liberty within a Rawlsian hierarchy of liberalism.

⁶ Giddens (1990) states that agency refers to the use of one's resources and abilities to respond to another's, or several others', use of their resources and abilities. Moreover, as Dominelli (2002) points out, one can use one's agency in positive or negative ways. Agency implies an active self not necessarily an active self that uses its agency in a positive way.

⁷ Sexually exploited children is a term that children who work in the sex trade have asked they be known by. I feel that it does not in fact fully represent the exploitation that these children face, but out of respect for their wishes, I also use this term.

⁸ I am referring to Sections 212, 213 and 214 of the Canadian Criminal Code which outlines the legal rights of sexually exploited children.