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Maria Grahn-Farley (University of Gothenburg, School of Law, Sweden)
Professor Maria Grahn-Farley is a child rights legal theorist. Her research focuses on the intersection of childhood, race, and gender - and the role of law in the making of the child as a rights-holding subject. Her recent book, Child Rights, Legal Theory and Social Advocacy (Cambridge University Press 2024) examines how the decline in Western democracies changes the conditions for human rights and its defense at its core. She currently leads a research project and is the coordinator of HR Just – a Horizon project funded by the European Union. The project examines how individual human rights protection is affected by the State's use of human rights as an instrument of governance, to justify and defend their actions, instead of as originally intended as a measurement of State compliance with the purpose of protecting individual persons against the abuse of the State. The project analyses the gaps in individual human rights protection that appear when the possession of rights is transferred from the individual to the State.
The Child being Heard but unable to Speak
Maria Grahn-Farley
The future has since the 1930’s at least in the West been associated with children. The idea that the destiny of the nation and the World rest with the children and the youth, and that tomorrow will be a better day because justice and democracy is to be carried forward by the more progressive values of the youth. This is how the child saving movement transformed into to a child rights regime. The belief was that if children had rights and were heard in society, they would also come to support democracy and justice for all. This turns out to not be entirely correct.
Here I would like us to reexamine – what happened with child rights, where and how did it fail. I will argue that it failed in its inability to manage the post-cold war era, forgetting that democracy and human rights is about substance and not only form. That as the child rights movement have embraced the child’s right to be heard it has forgotten the child’s right to freedom of speech.
This talk grapples with the disconnect between childhood as socially constructed and the child-rights identity as constructed through age, as in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). This monist identity construction, I argue differs from all other forms of identity constructions under the UN human rights treaty regime. More precisely, this talk concerns the role of violence in creating childhood that the monist child-rights identity obscures since the social has no part in its construction. Childhood partly springs from a relationship between time, violence, and silencing, as well as love and care. The function of silencing in the making of childhood is present both when the child is being loved and cared for, and when there is violence and abandonment involved in the shaping of childhood. Ultimately, in both the loving and the abandoned child situations, silencing serves to maintain an adult-privileged position, allowing with impunity the reconceptualization of the use of violence against children, as either being done in the name of love or for the benefit of the child. The idea that harm and abuse are an act of love is a common misconception in the understanding of childhood, and silencing allows this misconception to remain unchallenged.
To denaturalize the link between violence and childhood, one must go further than providing the opportunity for the child to be heard, and instead demand the child to be able to speak. Far too much child rights advocacy stops at the right to be heard without taking the step into the freedom of speech; this is a significant blind spot in the advocacy of child rights and a foundational right for a democracy.
Here I would like us to reexamine – what happened with child rights, where and how did it fail. I will argue that it failed in its inability to manage the post-cold war era, forgetting that democracy and human rights is about substance and not only form. That as the child rights movement have embraced the child’s right to be heard it has forgotten the child’s right to freedom of speech.
This talk grapples with the disconnect between childhood as socially constructed and the child-rights identity as constructed through age, as in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). This monist identity construction, I argue differs from all other forms of identity constructions under the UN human rights treaty regime. More precisely, this talk concerns the role of violence in creating childhood that the monist child-rights identity obscures since the social has no part in its construction. Childhood partly springs from a relationship between time, violence, and silencing, as well as love and care. The function of silencing in the making of childhood is present both when the child is being loved and cared for, and when there is violence and abandonment involved in the shaping of childhood. Ultimately, in both the loving and the abandoned child situations, silencing serves to maintain an adult-privileged position, allowing with impunity the reconceptualization of the use of violence against children, as either being done in the name of love or for the benefit of the child. The idea that harm and abuse are an act of love is a common misconception in the understanding of childhood, and silencing allows this misconception to remain unchallenged.
To denaturalize the link between violence and childhood, one must go further than providing the opportunity for the child to be heard, and instead demand the child to be able to speak. Far too much child rights advocacy stops at the right to be heard without taking the step into the freedom of speech; this is a significant blind spot in the advocacy of child rights and a foundational right for a democracy.
Internationale Vereinigung für Rechts- und Wirtschaftsphilosophie /
International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy
