ABSTRACT
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is law by ratification in both India and Canada. For this project the author conducted ethnographies in rural Punjab and Ontario, to study how the spirit of the Convention’s text is disseminated in two different contexts. The author argues that the CRC is inherently flawed because it is text-based and can therefore only create change in environments mediated by text. Access to textually mediated spaces is varied by country of origin, class and gender. The rural girl child in Punjab is, as a result, left largely outside the influence of the CRC.