News from the Journal:  Issue #3 on Children’s Rights

Laura L. Lovett, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This fall members of the Society for the History of Children and Youth will be receiving the third issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Marking the twentieth anniversary U.N. General Assembly’s unanimous adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, this issue offers essays and reviews that speak to the complex and varied contexts that inform the history of children’s rights and welfare.

The contributors to this issue illustrate how historically specific events created local differences in the understanding and implementation of programs dedicated to child welfare and children’s rights.  Margaret Jacobs’ “Object Lesson” asks us to consider three photographs of Native American girls and their dolls and how these seemingly innocent pictures of girls at play also represent the imposition of white reformers’ values concerning mothering, health, and hygiene on Hopi and Mescalero Apache girls.  Linda Gordon directly challenges the use of the “innocent-child” rhetoric in her essay on the history of child policies in the United States, which is drawn from her address at the 2007 meeting of the Society for the History of Children and Youth.  By critically analyzing policies concerning custody, legitimacy, family violence, welfare, and immigration, Gordon argues that putting-children-first in the United States has not been constructive.  Recognizing and treating children as separate from their parents did not materially help or protect children.  Indeed, pitting children’s “interests” against parent’s “interests,” especially the “interests” of mothers, as well as conflict over what constituted the “interests of the child” undercut the effectiveness of child policies in the United States.

Like Gordon, Dominique Marshall’s essay highlights how children’s interests were separated from those of their parents as Food Stations set up in the wake of World War One fed children, but not their parents.  Marshall grounds her history of children’s rights in Herbert Hoover’s efforts on behalf of children as Director of the American Relief Administration and later as President of the United States.  Her analysis reveals how Hoover’s Child’s Bill of Rights and Children’s Charter presaged the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Afua Twum-Danso’s discussion of the adoption of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child in Africa and Deena Haydon’s discussion of the impact of the Convention in Northern Ireland provide perspective on cotemporary children’s rights.  Twum-Danso explores the tension between universality and locality of children’s rights with an insightful discussion of the construction of childhood by policy makers and by local communities.  Twum-Danso’s argument that local communities should be involved in the interpretation and implementation of children’s rights policies resonates with Deena Haydon’s rich description of the reception of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Northern Ireland.  Based on extensive interviews with children and youth in the region, Haydon’s article gives Irish children a voice and reveals both the relevance of the Convention to their lives and the importance of their involvement with its implementation and interpretation.

© Society for the History of Children and Youth, 2008

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