Introduction

Abstract

With this book, we want to reconsider children’s rights in the sense of how children themselves can exercise and enjoy these rights, in what ways they need the support of adults to do so and how they can make a claim to such support. We are not interested in revisiting the controversial philosophical and legal debates about whether children can or should actually have rights or whether it makes sense to grant them specific rights.1 Our intention is more practical. The starting point of this book is the premise that children nowadays have rights and might need more of them, and that their rights must be understood as human rights, to which children are entitled in the same way as adults. Following the assumption that ‘there is a distinction between “having” rights and being allowed to exercise them’ (Freeman, 2009: 387), we want to investigate what must happen so that children’s rights become relevant for children, and children themselves recognize them as relevant and use them for their current and future lives.