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Children's rights movement

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Animal & Human Rights

   The children's rights movement is a historical and modern movement
   committed to the acknowledgement, expansion, and/or regression of the
   rights of children around the world.

History

   Thomas Spence's The Rights of Infants (1796) is a prehistoric
   English-language assertion of the natural rights of children.

   In the USA, the children's rights movement was born in the 1800s with
   the orphan train. In the big cities, when a child's parents died, the
   child frequently had to go to work to support him or herself. Boys
   generally became factory or coal workers, and girls became prostitutes
   or saloon girls, or else went to work in a sweat shop. All of these
   jobs paid only starvation wages.

   In 1852, Massachusetts required children to attend school. In 1853,
   Charles Brace founded the Children's Aid Society, which worked hard to
   take street children in. The following year, the children were placed
   on a train headed for the West, where they were adopted, and often
   given work. By 1929, the orphan train had stopped running altogether,
   but its principles lived on.

   The National Child Labor Committee, an organization dedicated to the
   abolition of all child labor, was formed in the 1890s. It managed to
   pass one law, which was struck down by the Supreme Court two years
   later for violating a child's right to contract his work. In 1924,
   Congress attempted to pass a constitutional amendment that would
   authorize a national child labor law. This measure was blocked, and the
   bill was eventually dropped. It took the Great Depression to end child
   labor nationwide; adults had become so desperate for jobs that they
   would work for the same wage as children. In 1938, President Franklin
   D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act which, amongst other
   things, placed limits on many forms of child labor.

   Now that child labor had been effectively eradicated, the movement
   turned to other things, but it again stalled when World War II broke
   out and children and women began to enter the work force once more.
   With millions of adults at war, the children were needed to help keep
   the country running. In Europe, children served as couriers,
   intelligence collectors, and other underground resistance workers in
   opposition to Hitler's regime.

   It should be noted the child labour was also wiped out in Europe and
   not just America, one such an act in America did not affect those of
   Europe. This act was a follow on from a similar one in some countries
   of Europe previously.

Present

   In the early twentieth century, moves began to promote the idea of
   children's rights as distinct from those of adults and as requiring
   explicit recognition. The Polish educationalist Janusz Korczak wrote of
   the rights of children in his book How to Love a Child (Warsaw, 1919);
   a later book was entitled The Child's Right to Respect (Warsaw, 1929).
   In 1917, following the Russian Revolution, the Moscow branch of the
   organisation Proletkult produced a Declaration of Children's Rights.
   However, the first effective attempt to promote children's rights was
   the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, drafted by Eglantyne Jebb
   in 1923 and adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. This was accepted
   by the United Nations on its formation and updated in 1959, and
   replaced with a more extensive UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
   in 1989.

   With the formation of of the United Nations and extending to present
   day, the children's rights movement has become global in focus. While
   the situation of children in the United States has become greatly
   stabilized, children around the world have increasingly become engaged
   in illegal, forced child labor, genital mutilation, military service,
   and sex trafficking. Several international organizations have rallied
   to the assistance of children. They include Save the Children, Free the
   Children, and the Children's Defense Fund.

Ombudsmanship

   Several countries have created an institute of children's rights
   ombudsman, most notably Sweden, Finland and Ukraine, which is first
   country worldwide to install children at that post. In Ukraine Ivan
   Cherevko and Julia Kruk became first children's rights ombudsmen in
   late 2005.

Controversy

   The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has attempted to outline a
   standard premise for the children's rights movement, there is no
   international standard which all children or adults adhere to. Two
   nations – the United States and Somalia – have refused to ratify the
   CRC; many that have ratified nevertheless have failed to operate by its
   parameters. Likewise, there is an international movement to refocus the
   child rights dialog towards expanding the rights of children, towards
   voting and full civic membership and participation.

   A Canadian lawyer has proposed that although the concept of children's
   rights, on the surface, appears to be an ideal goal, there are
   dangerous political and legal changes that may leave children at the
   mercy of the government.

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