The Convention on the Rights of the Child and its conception of childhood

Discussions about the Convention on the Rights of the Child are often excessively legalistic. This obscures the possibility for a deeper engagement with the text of the Convention to identify its underlying values and conception of childhood. This paper engages with this less chartered terrain. It first traces the shift from an instrumentalist, to a welfarist, to a rights-based conception of childhood. Next, it explores the discrete features of this rights based conception of childhood under the Convention which is shown to recognise and accommodate both children’s vulnerabilities and evolving capacities while also challenging traditional systems that silence and marginalise children. Finally, it addresses some of the enduring and emerging concerns with the idea of children’s rights – that it is divisive, grounded in western values and incapable of accommodating non-human ecological concerns – to reveal a more dynamic, relational and accommodating conception of childhood than is often assumed to be the case under a rights-based approach.