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Chapter 15 - Christianity's mixed contributions to children's rights

Traditional teachings, modern doubts

from PART II - RESPONSIBILITIES OF CHILDREN AND ADULTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2012

By
Don S. Browning  and
John Witte
Edited by
Marcia J. Bunge
Marcia J. Bunge
Affiliation:
Valparaiso University, Indiana
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Summary

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is a landmark in the modern international protection of children's rights. Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989, its fifty-four articles and two Optional Protocols set out a lengthy catalogue of rights for children. The CRC bans all discrimination against children, including on grounds of their birth status. It provides children with rights to life, to a name, to a social identity, to the care and nurture of both parents; to education, health care, recreation, rest, and play; to freedom of association, expression, thought, conscience, and religion; and to freedom from neglect or negligent treatment, from physical and sexual abuse, from cruel and inhumane treatment, and from compulsory military service. The CRC adds special protections for children who are refugees, displaced, orphaned, kidnapped, enslaved, or addicted; for children involuntarily separated from their parents, families, and home communities; for children with disabilities; and for children drawn into a state's legal system.

The CRC is not the first modern international statement on children's rights, although it is the most comprehensive. It builds in part on provisions in the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1924) and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959). It incorporates and imputes directly to children a number of the rights provisions already set out in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights or UDHR (1948) and elaborated in the twin 1966 international covenants on civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. And it reflects and confirms a series of other international laws and treaties that facilitate international adoption, immigration, and education, and that prohibit child labor, pornography, prostitution, trafficking, soldiering, and more.

Type
Chapter
Information
Children, Adults, and Shared Responsibilities
Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives
 , pp. 272 - 291
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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