[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.The Movement for Children s RightsOne very prominent organization in the United States advocating on be-half of children is the Children s Defense Fund (CDF), founded by MarianWright Edelman, who as of this writing remains its director and most power-ful spokesperson.As we saw in chapter 1, the CDF researches and publishesinformation on the well-being of children in its Yearbook.The mission state-ment of the Children s Defense Fund makes a claim about what children  de-serve as children, as human beings.While the language does not use the term rights the rationale behind the statement is consistent with this approach.The mission of the CDF reads,The mission of the Children s Defense Fund is to Leave No Child Behind and toensure every child.A Healthy Start, A Head Start, A Fair Start, A Safe Start, AMoral Start, in life and a successful passage to adulthood with the help of caringfamilies and communities.2The healthy, head, fair, safe and moral  starts that the CDF seeks are directlyrelated to children s needs and the legitimate claims they can make on thecommunity.Children deserve adequate nutrition, access to quality education(even in the preschool years), safe neighborhoods, and opportunities to growin the moral life.The demands that the CDF makes on behalf of children, es-pecially poor children, directly impinge on how adults envision their respon-sibilities and relationships.The CDF challenges adults to transform their livesand to act in the best interests of children who suffer both from material pov-erty and what Pamela Couture calls the  poverty of tenuous connections. 3The Children s Defense Fund is just one example of an organization drivento ensure children s human rights, and along with other organizations, likeUNICEF, for example, its mission is in many ways an attempt to live outthe mandates of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which forms thecornerstone of contemporary debates about children s rights.The Conventionfrequently serves as the benchmark for assessing the well-being of childrenaround the world.Before looking at this document and its implications ingreater detail, we will first consider briefly the emergence of the movementfor children s rights in which we can place contemporary organizations likethe CDF or UNICEF.This history is important for our present task becausewe must be alert to the assumptions about childhood that have been operative52 Chapter 2in the movement in order to see how these continue to shape our attempts tosecure child well-being.Historian Hugh Cunningham has detailed the emergence of philanthropicand state movements for the protection of children in Great Britain.4 TheIndustrial Revolution, bringing with it the ability for mass production, ofteninvolved the movement of people from the countryside where an agrariansociety had once thrived, to the cities as they sought work in the factories.The need for families to provide for themselves combined with the need formore inexpensive labor created a space for child wage labor in the industrialsector.Now as we have seen, children in previous centuries were not strang-ers to work.They had often worked on family farms, in cottage industries, asthe caretakers of younger siblings, and as apprentices to skilled laborers.Thatchildren worked was nothing new.That children could be exploited for theirlabor (on farms, in domestic service, as slaves and sex workers) was also noth-ing new.What was different were their working conditions and the ease withwhich large numbers of children could be exploited to increase profits.Thisform of work and the potential for exploitation was more visible in the newinstitution of the factory.Added to the changing perceptions about childrenand childhood, this situation sparked increased concern and critique on thepart of philanthropists and others concerned about the changes wrought byindustrialization.Similarly, the United States saw the emergence of Children s Aid So-cieties in the nineteenth century.The image of the family as an organicunit in which each member had a place that entailed mutual rights andresponsibilities was still prevalent.Such a model of family, and children splace therein, could not according to historian Joseph Hawes,  address theproblem of children who seemed to be living by their wits on city streets inthe middle of the nineteenth century [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]