Children’s Rights as ‘Work in Progress’: The Conceptual and Practical Contributions of Working Children’s Movements

Abstract

Dominant social representations of children mostly imagine children as incapable of meaningfully and significantly engaging with their rights. Accordingly, even when taking a ‘broader’ view on children’s rights, outside of the children’s work debate, a large part of the literature seems to be based on the assumption that children first need to be enabled and offered spaces by adults to do so, or are simply dependent on the advocacy of adults understood as a speaking and acting on behalf of children and their rights. Grugel and Piper (2007), who in their monograph about the rights of migrants and children and their relation with newly emerging global governance regimes repeatedly refer to the necessity of inquiring into the rights-related practices of the rights holders themselves, and explicitly highlight the value of ‘introducing a social movement or activist perspective into the academic debate about rights’ (ibid.: 32), still largely confine their description of social and political struggles revolving around children’s rights to the actions of NGOs and other adult actors. While we agree with the assessment that ‘poor children and migrants […] are among the most marginalized and invisible groups in all societies’ (ibid.: 152) and face ‘considerable obstacles to their self-organization into effective social movements’ (ibid.), from our own empirically based studies and practical experience with children and youth we know that the invisibility of children’s organizations and social movements in dominant discourses on children does not equate with their inexistence.