Children’s Rights Since Margaret Thatcher

Abstract

The year 1979 — the year Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister — was declared by the United Nations as the International Year of the Child. It was also the year when there was a major, international push to codify children’s rights and to begin the drafting process of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child — the first international, legally enforceable treaty to focus specifically on children. A year after Mrs Thatcher left office, in 1991, the UK ratified the UNCRC, enshrining its ideals in UK law and agreeing to be accountable to the United Nations for ensuring that children’s rights were implemented in the UK. Thatcher’s grandchildren, therefore, are those who came to adulthood under a new era of children’s rights and, more than any other generation, are those on whom the impact of these social changes is most apparent and who are the ones most likely to be able to claim and benefit from these rights. Yet the legacy from the Thatcher years is a complex one. British children, we are told, are now the unhappiest in Europe (as well as the fattest and most academically underachieving). UNICEF, as well as the Committee on the Rights of the Child, continually upbraids the British government for failing to fulfil its duties under the UNCRC, and there are repeated claims in the media that British childhood is in crisis and that British children are the unhappiest in Europe, as well as the most stressed and over-sexualised. (These claims will be discussed later in the chapter, but for a full analysis of them see Kehily 2010. They are also discussed in this book: see the chapter by Jane Pilcher.)