An analysis on children’s rights in stories recommended for children in Turkey

Abstract

Children’s rights are legally protected benefits for children to develop physically, mentally, emotionally, socially and morally with freedom and honor in a healthy and normal way. It is important that children know the rights they have. Works of high quality children’s literature ensure the socialization of children by making them understand or communicate social and cultural values. For this reason, all the works of children’s literature may be made use of for children’s rights education. The objective of this study is to determine to what extent and how children’s rights are allocated in the stories in the 100 Basic Literary Works list recommended for children in Turkey. To this end, all the stories (n=277) in the above mentioned storybook list (n=21) were examined in the context of children’s rights by use of content analysis method. ‘Children’s rights’ was taken as the analysis category, and this category was divided into four subcategories in keeping with the Convention on the Rights of the Child as the ‘survival rights’, ‘development rights’, ‘protection rights’ and ‘participation rights’ of the child. Each subcategory was evaluated as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ within itself in terms of allocating children’s rights. At the end of the study, it was found that positive (56.1%) and negative (43.9%) statements about children’s rights were used in close proportions in these stories. In the stories that were studied, positive statements about children’s ‘development rights’ were used the most often (29.7%), and this was followed by the negative statements about children’s ‘protection rights’ (22.1%).

Keywords:

• children’s literature
• 100 Basic Literary Works
• story
• children’s rights

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Dr Canan Aslan, Faculty of Educational Sciences, Ankara University, who has helped in analyzing data and provided valuable suggestions for revising the article.

Notes

1. To punish someone by beating someone on the bare soles of the feet, using a stick or truncheon or a form of punishment consisting in beating an offender on the soles of his feet.