Children’s Rights Theory

1.     I first heard about Ursula le Guin’s fabled city at a refugee rally. The ordinary denizens of the Antipodes were compared to the happy people of Omelas, who live in utopian bliss beside a sparkling harbour, half-encircled by mountains, in avenues lined by trees where merry women dance and children play. Like the lucky people of Australia, the citizens of Omelas are free to enjoy all the luxury and convenience they desire — but with one condition. The price of this happiness is the immeasurable suffering of a single child, kept in a dungeon beneath the city, to whom no one must speak a kind word, or help in any way.

(1)  The tale of citizens leaving in disgust was cited as a point of reference, the shocking conditions on Manus Island and Nauru described, and a call to action voiced for the people of Australia to similarly reject the social contract, to refuse privilege premised on suffering.

(2)  The child of Omelas is a single, singular, paradigmatic child who embodies all the qualities that uninterrogated childhood is apt to embody – innocence, vulnerability, dependence. She is not a foreigner, not a refugee, but not a local either, just an abstraction of childhood who occupies her position without any explanation. As such, she can be likened to the phantasm of childhood itself. There are other children in Omelas, the ones who play in the streets, in endless harmonious bliss, while their adult counterparts do the adult equivalent of the same. But the child in the dungeon is the core of what childhood is to many societies – a state that exists only as a counterpoint to the experience of the adult population.

(3)  At no point does anyone point out that the performative gesture does nothing for the child, still locked in the dungeon, as these much-lauded outliers, who walk away, free themselves of the moral conundrum.

(4)  I like to imagine the child of Omelas freeing herself, and walking away from the sparkling city eventually, no thanks to any of its conscientious objectors.

(5)  What meaning would this child make of the moral claims of these travellers?

2.     In 1983, Nancy Hartsock wrote that feminists needed to address questions of power more directly. She noted the comprehensive class analysis advanced by Marx, and the relative absence of analyses of domination and submission based on gender or race. Power, she noted, is best understood as the capacity to control the will and actions of others, the ability to compel obedience.

(1)  The children’s liberation movement of the 1970s, a movement so radical it has been largely forgotten, argued that the modern conception of childhood is oppressive and in need of being dismantled.
(2)  Hartsock does not mention the child liberationists when listing criteria for domination and oppression, despite her summary of the implicit feminist understanding of power — ‘the ability to compel obedience’ — which applies more obviously to adult-child relations than to anything else.

3.     A few years ago, I interviewed three young women about the criminal justice system. One described living on the streets of Brisbane’s CBD after running away from a foster home. She described how the street kids supported each other, sharing food, and keeping watch.

(1) ‘It was both wonderful and terrible.’

(2) I remembered unchaperoned childhood. Spencer Street Station, teaming with foot traffic. Pulling a motel door closed and savouring the self-containment. An empty house, dishes piling up beside the sink, a curry gone off in the fridge.

(3) What would the runaways have talked about, huddled in those city streets, with more and less privacy than ever before?

(4) Then, the young woman told me, she robbed someone at knifepoint and was put in prison. Not in youth detention, but in the adult prison, at seventeen.

(5) ‘…every child deprived of liberty shall be separated from adults unless it is considered in the child’s best interest not to do so …’ (Convention on the rights of the child, article 37)

(6) The women’s prison was much better than juvie. In juvie, there was so much drama.

(7) When I asked the young women how they could have been dealt with better, they shook their heads defeatedly. The youngest looked at me with suspicion. She corrected my pronunciation when I asked about her Māori heritage. I felt myself in the seat of the oppressor.

a.   ‘Anyone who speaks for others should only do so out of a concrete analysis of the particular power relations and descriptive effects involved.’ (Linda Alcoff)
b.  ‘There is no such thing as a trustworthy adult.’ (N.K. Jemisin)

3A. At the La Boite Theatre in the winter of 2021, ten young people from diverse backgrounds made amendments to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and critiqued norms around children’s treatment in a performance entitled ‘The Time is Now’. At the end of each night, a prominent adult was given a microphone and asked to respond.

(1)  ‘I thought their criticisms of the Convention kind of missed the point,’ I said over a glass of red, rubbing my gloved hands together at a wine barrel table. ‘There was no mention of civil and political rights.’ ‘No,’ my girlfriend agreed. ‘It was all about the right to childhood.’

a.   ‘The right to ice cream,’ a 12-year-old cried, after a monologue about excursions with her father.
b.  ‘The right to immaturity,’ declared a boy.

(2)   ‘When did you first read the Convention?’ my girlfriend asked. ‘I remember using it in one of my volunteer jobs. I would have been early 20s. I don’t know if I read it before that.’
(3)  She mentioned the teenaged niece of a friend. ‘I should’ve invited her.’
(4)  A review of the performance entitled ‘La Boite makes history with all-teenage cast’ described it as using ‘powerful speeches to give voice to a generation often silenced or dismissed; weaving in movement, dialogue and surprise cameo appearances to inspire audiences both young and old.’
(5)  A boy outlined how the Convention was developed. ‘No children were consulted,’ he declared. There was a titter from the audience at this.

a.   The review does not mention the boy’s point.
b.  The adult who spoke on the night we attended did not engage with it.
c.   That laughter.

4.     When I was still young enough to be read to in bed, my mother retrieved some picture books from my grandparents’ spare room. From one of these, she read to me in the narrative voice of a little girl. The girl had been handed a ball and was being asked if she was any good at throwing. ‘I’m quite good at throwing tantrums,’ the girl said thoughtfully.

(1) My rejection of the attribution of these words to a child was visceral.
(2) The picture book was subsequently put away, my mother dismissing it as ‘a bit old-fashioned’, absolving me of the need to find the words for my more specific gripe.
(3) But can you really, viscerally, reject an author’s smug, almost sadistic, disempowerment of her young narrator, when you lack words like ‘attribution’ and ‘visceral’?
(4) Children’s books sometimes contain what a children’s author I know (and who hates the label) calls, ‘a nudge and a wink to the adult reader’. When I suggest that children should be used as sensitivity readers, she says, ‘But they’re not the ones buying the books.’
(5) ‘Somebody said of you when you were young,/“That child hates being a child”/… I had to look at you, the little daughter/Where you sat glumly on bare linoleum/ hitting a block with another block/Until I felt it, the humiliation…’ (Alicia Ostriker)

5.     When I was seven, I decided to run away.

(1)  In books, when someone ran away, there was an illustration of them striding along a country trail, their worldly possessions slung over their shoulder in a piece of fabric tied into an impressive-looked bundle and hoisted onto the end of a pole. In the outer suburbs of Ballarat in the early 90s, I was at a loss as to where to find such rustic luggage. I sat on the top bunk of the Invermay house, looking out at the driveway which led to Dawes Road, imagining the journey I would set out on if only I were appropriately equipped.
(2)  When my mother and I had sorted out our differences, I told her about the obstacle I had encountered. She said that sort of luggage was depicted only because it was evocative, and that in real life, you could use something far more commonplace. When, sceptical, I asked what exactly, she suggested a backpack.

6.     When I come across a title like ‘Children’s Literature: Colonial or Post Colonial?’, I think eureka! Someone has written about the colonisation of children’s headspace by adult ideas.

(1)  Then I realise these are studies of representations of post-colonial societies, in the usual sense, in children’s literature.
(2)  Gayatri Spivak calls the silencing of marginalised groups ‘epistemic violence.’
(3)  Human research ethics applications are considered higher risk when they involve participants under 18. For this reason, most human research is done on adult participants. This is not generally seen as a limitation or distortion.

a.   When I am preparing my ethics application, I consider how I can show that I have thought about minimising risk. One of the steps I take is to stress that participants must be over 18.

7.     On my ninth birthday, I stood in front of the mirror, looked myself in the eye, and said: I’m halfway. Around the same time, my mother explained how the Bronte sisters published using male pseudonyms. Wuthering Heights sat enticingly on the top shelf. Proof positive of the potential social and political rights of the subject. That was how you got social mobility. That was how you changed your place in the world.

(1)   ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ (Virginia Woolf)
(2)  ‘Mama may have, and papa may have, but God bless the child that’s got his own.’ (Billie Holiday)

a. My mother said Holiday was singing about class.
b. I thought the lines were about economic rights.
c. Holiday reportedly wrote the song after a fight with her mother.

(3)  Very few children have money or a room of their own.

8.     In 1999, I submitted a poem called ‘Election Day’ to the Melbourne University feminist magazine, Judy’s Punch ‘…Today/I sing ancient lyrics/Read Sappho, taste/My sequestration./Today I am monument/To the early days of/Womanhood. Compose myself/For next year. Today,/I am woman, stage one.’

(1)  I hesitated, unsure whether my point would be understood, then added, below the title, ‘(Written while underage but politically aware)’. I meant it as a note to the editor, but the explanation was published along with the poem, and I cringed to see the hastily-written words reproduced in its glossy pages.
(2)  Many years later, reintroduced to that editor by a girlfriend, I reminded her how we first met when she was Women’s Officer at Melbourne University. ‘But you weren’t at university at 15, were you?’ she said, startled.
(3)  ‘What being a child was like for me was, at the same time, like being an adult in bad drag as a child and being a child in bad drag as an adult.’ (Eve Sedgewick).

8A.      Crying in the bath of the flat I had rented, I thought of Alice, blown up to enormous proportions after eating a cake, submerged along with the animals, in the pool of her tears. I wrote a poem called ‘Alice in Womanhood.’ ‘Here in this bathtub/Something has stretched me into/A fully grown/Woman. . .’

a.   ‘The exception that proves the rule.’ This phrase resounded threateningly as I bought groceries, cooked meals, attended lectures.
b.  ‘You’re not ready for this,’ the mature age student in one of my classes told me. ‘I have to be ready for it,’ I told him.
c.   ‘How is living alone?’ my English teacher asked, when we caught up after I had started uni. ‘Oh, it’s fine,’ I said. ‘I lived alone for periods from a very early age.’
d.  ‘You’re 16 and you’ve got your own place?’ a salesman asked, when I was unable to sign up for some service, due to a minimum age.
e.   ‘I find your comments fascinating,’ read the response I received, when I submitted feedback in a survey of community views on local political issues. ‘However, as you noted, the voting age is a federal issue…’

9.     In 2010, Jessica Watson made headlines by sailing around the world solo at 16. Watson was named Young Australian of the Year in 2011 and awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2012 for ‘service to sailing and to youth through the achievement of sailing solo and unassisted around the world, and as a role model for young Australians.’

(1)  In the Netflix movie True Spirit, one of the family’s detractors chides, gesturing towards the Pink Lady, ‘That is a tiny vessel to send a child out to sea in!’
(2)  When Watson collides with a freight ship that has gone off course on the first night of her test run, after forgetting to set her alarms, the media grilles her coach about how he can be sure 16 isn’t too young.
(3)  ‘Is it seaworthy?’ her mother asks. ‘She reckons it is,’ her coach says. ‘Oh, well as long as the 16-year-old—’ Her worried father is cut off by her coach. He says Jess needs to know she can do this alone.
(4)  In an interview, Watson says with a laugh that the movie made it look as though she just forgot to set the alarms. There was, she says, a bit more to it than that.
(5)  In the movie, Watson’s 10-year-old sister confidently gives the media updates. ‘The captain has made her decision, and we have no further comment.’
(6)  As Watson ‘surfs’ through a megastorm, her emergency alarm goes off. Her mother sobs that she is 15 feet underwater; then her boat surfaces and she sails on, returning to Sydney Harbour where 80,000 people welcome her as a hero.
(7)  In an interview, Watson’s father recalls ‘an extraordinary level of criticism – people saying if you let this girl go you’ve got blood on your hands.’
(8)  Both state and federal governments sought a way to prevent her attempting the voyage.
(9)  ‘I feel so alone,’ the movie character weeps on the phone to her mother, becalmed for two weeks, floating on the Atlantic, going nowhere.

9B.      In 2009, Dutch 13-year-old Laura Dekker announced her intention to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe unassisted. Later that year, Dekker was reported to be under investigation by Dutch child protection authorities. A short-term order was made, while she was assessed psychologically, and it was noted that she had been picked up in Britain earlier that year, having sailed there alone from the Netherlands.

(1)  A communist I’m friends with on Facebook posted that she was ‘sick of rich kids sailing around the world.’
(2)  The courts only succeeded in delaying Dekker for a year. She set sail in 2010 as a 14-year-old.

9C.      In September 2021, the creators of data analysis website CovidBaseAU revealed themselves to be three teenaged boys aged 14 and 15. Jack, Darcy and Wesley posted a photo of themselves after receiving the Moderna vaccine, when vaccinations were opened to the 12 to 15 age group, saying they thought this would be a good time to reveal who they really were.

(1)  The website tracked the number of COVID cases, the number of vaccinations, and the number of close contacts in each state and territory each day. It was relied on by many mainstream news outlets including The Guardian.

a.   ‘I started to track the data just for fun.’
b.   ‘Darcy’s really skilled at coding and I’m sort of really into the news.’
c.   ‘We tried to make it as comprehensive as possible.’
d.  ‘The government’s released data in all different places and in different formats…’
e.   ‘We get all our schoolwork done, don’t worry.’
f.   ‘We did want to reveal who we were, but we wanted to do it at the right time.’
g.  ‘The support’s been amazing.’

(2)  ‘I might be out of a job soon.’ (Data analyst)

9AA.   The effect of gender is produced through a stylized repetition of acts. These acts, gestures, and enactments… constitute the identity they are said to express.’ (Judith Butler)

(1)  The status of being a child, or an adult, is also produced through the stylised repetition of acts. In both instances, this performativity is most obvious when norms are transgressed; it is noticed least when norms are reinforced.

a.   Playing on play equipment.
b.  Playing with blocks.
c.   Play generally.
d.  Go and play.

9AB.   ‘Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female—whenever she behaves as a human being, she is said to imitate the male.’ (Simone de Beauvoir)

(1)  ‘Adultification.’
(2)  ‘Parentification.’

10.  A child under 14 does not have the requisite knowledge to possess a criminal intention and can be found guilty of an offence only if evidence has established that the child knew the difference between right and wrong (doli incapax).

(1)  ‘What if you were a child under 14 who just rejected the good/evil binary?’ An older colleague gave me a look.
(2)  A magistrate — white, male, blustering — said that if my client’s parents weren’t teaching him the difference between right and wrong, a child protection notification should be made.

a.   My colleagues gaped when I repeated these words, back at the office.

10A.    #raisetheage sought to raise the minimum age of criminal liability to 14 in Australia, in line with the international average.

(1) ‘Children belong at school, not in prison,’ was the sort of line that introduced social media posts with the hashtag, along with the picture of the poster as a ten-year-old, astride a horse or on a netball court.
(2) ‘I wish this campaign would be linked to a push to lower the voting age,’ I said. ‘The hypocrisy around how young people are treated in this society is the larger issue’.
(3) I did not say, ‘No minority has ever won rights by emphasising its lack of competence.’

11.  15% of convicts shipped to Australia from England were under 18. The youngest was nine. Children were transported for stealing a bonnet or stockings. At the time, a person in England could be found guilty of an offence if they were over seven, provided it was proven that they knew right from wrong.

(1)  At the time of transportation, less than five per cent of British adults had the vote. In this sense, adults and children of the convict class had comparable social status.
(2)  Children who were sent to Australia were considered lucky to have avoided the death penalty.
(3)  Some of the correspondence of child convicts is preserved in the Tasmanian Archives.
(4)  “Dear mother I hope you will forgive me and that I will be a better boy…”
(5)  These letters were encouraged and dictated by reforming officers. As such, they are not a reliable record of the children’s own voices.

12.  In Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House, Machado reflects on what has been called ‘the violence of the archive’ or ‘archival silence’ — the difficult fact that sometimes important stories are destroyed or never told in the first place, leading to lacunas in our collective histories.

13.  About my attempts to voice my own experience in real time, I remember this:

(1) My 45-year-old guitar teacher to 17-year-old me: ‘It would be very cynical to describe childhood as a time of oppression.’ 17-year-old me: ‘How would you describe it?’ 45-year-old guitar teacher: ‘The free-est time of my life.’

a.    Which theorist was it who argued that just as children imagine that when they are adults, they will be free, adults imagine that when they were children, they were free? In this way, late capitalist society uses the false dichotomy of child/adult to convince us all that at some point in our lives we are free.

(2)  My twenty-six-year-old boyfriend to sixteen-year-old me: ‘I don’t use the word oppression in relation to children.’

a.   A diatribe about the existing laws being sufficient.
b.  My awareness that he was saying I should not have the same rights as him.
c.   The term ‘mansplaining’ had not yet been coined.

(3)  Woman in Telstra shop to 17-year-old me (after telling me the contract required a guardian’s signature): ‘That must be hard, living on your own.’ 17-year-old me: ‘It’s not hard. It’s just inconvenient when it comes to stuff like this.’

a.   ‘Stuff like getting phones?’
b.  ‘Ha ha, you crack me up.’

14.  Tantrum /ˈtantrəm/

noun
an uncontrolled outburst of anger and frustration, typically in a young child.
“He has temper tantrums if he can’t get his own way.”

(1) In the 2010s conceptual artist Audrey Wollen expressed the notion of Sad Girl Theory, commenting on the popularisation of representations of female sadness. Sad Girl Theory asserts that the sadness of girls — photos of women crying — should be recognised as active resistance, a way of reclaiming agency over female bodies, lives, and identities.
(2) ‘Why are they crying,’ a friend asked, as we walked across Circular Quay, talking about our life crises, and gestured towards a wailing toddler. ‘Nothing’s even happened to them yet.’ ‘Probably because they have no control over their lives,’ I said thoughtfully, watching as a harried mother forced a sunhat onto a child.
(3) Anne Geddes made a name photographing babies set in baskets, in flowerpots, in fluffy bear and butterfly and bumble bee costumes. In an interview, Geddes was quoted as describing a nightmare that one day she would be a little old lady ‘and all these angry 30-year-olds have come looking for me.’

a.   In a Ballarat shopping centre, my school friends exclaiming, ‘So cute!’
b.  ‘Exploitative’ has been a criticism of Geddes.
c.   ‘Objectifying’ is more often levelled at Bill Henson.

(4) In 1990, I crouched in the gutter of Dare Street, Wendouree. ‘Help me, somebody!’ I screamed to parents loading uniformed children into cars, as my mother dragged me into the passenger seat. Eyes turned away, giving her privacy.

15.  ‘What social group is most marginalised?’
‘Maybe children.’
‘Children don’t count.’
‘Exactly.’

16.  Australia is the first country to restrict access to social media to over 16s.

(1)  As I drive home, someone is talking on the radio about whether there might be a constitutional challenge. Many children are heavily involved in activism, on climate change and other issues, which is often organised through social media. ‘People under 18 don’t have voting rights,’ the man being interviewed notes. It’s unclear, is what he is getting at, whether the right to freedom of political communication extends to them.

a.   The trauma of not being seen. Who is­ allowed into the public sphere? Who is
allowed to be visible? (Johanna Hedva)
b.  The young person sighted in public is recognised only as at risk, or as the risk itself. (Joanne Faulkner)

(2)  An article in The Conversation listed ways that age restrictions may impact freedom of political communication without being found to be invalid.

a.   Movies and video games that carry age restrictions may contain political content.
b.  Political discussions may occur in licensed premises, where minors are not permitted entry.

(3)  The High Court agrees to hear a constitutional challenge by two 15-year-olds, backed by Digital Freedom, a Libertarian Party initiative. One of the plaintiffs talks of ‘a lazy government that blanket bans under‑16s rather than investing in programs to help kids be safe online.’

a.   ‘Challenges brought by people with ulterior motives’ says a government spokesperson.
b.  ‘Social media is doing social harm to our children.’ (Anthony Albanese)
c.   ‘There is no place for predatory algorithms targeting children.’ (Anika Wells)

(4)  Academics interview 84 young people between 11 and 15 on their views on the new laws in response to the absence of young voices in the national conversation about their social media use.

a.   ‘It’s like trapping water with a net.’
b.  ‘I think there should just be more education and restrictions.’
c.    ‘There should just be like a crackdown on the content.’

17.  In my second year of uni, I discovered a reading list on critical childhood studies, and cut it out excitedly, to stash where it would not be lost. The pages have found their way into a plastic sleeve in a folder of old assignments. I have cut out two columns of citations and pasted them onto four sheets of lined note paper, torn out of a ring binder. The first item is, ‘Aries, Phillipe, Centuries of Childhood: A social history of family life. Tr by Robert Baldick. New York: Random house, 1962.’ The last is ‘Soman, Shirley Camper. Let’s Stop Destroying our Children. New York: Hawthorne books, 1974’. At the top of one of the pages is my teenage handwriting in pink: ‘The Children’s Rights Movement: overcoming the oppression of young people, Beatrice and Ronald Gross (New York: Anchor Press/Doublexday, 1977.’

(1)  I remember jumping to my feet in my bedroom, as if the very existence of this area of scholarship confirmed the possibility of change.
(2)  I was still young enough to write about this with authority.
(3)  ‘To gaze back is to refuse the imposition of a dominant ideology of looking that renders us passive objects.’ (bell hooks)

18.  I walked to the local church to cast my first vote, politely accepting cards from all the parties. I showed ID at a bar and was handed alcohol. I got my driver’s licence. I put aside the thesis idea.

(1)  I could no longer write from the standpoint of childhood.
(2)  I would no longer be the subaltern speaking.
(3)  And now here I am, just another adult who thinks she remembers childhood.