In 2012, a German district court in the city of Cologne decided that male circumcision for non-therapeutical reasons amounted to criminal assault that could not be justified by parental consent. Over a period of several months, between the decision and the drafting of the amending legislation, the German public and academy became embroiled in a remarkably heated and emotional debate about the future of the practice. But this time, the resentment did not just appear in the notorious online world but became woven into medical and legal arguments against circumcision. Even though critics of circumcision were eager to stress that their concerns were children’s rights alone, the Cologne debate sent a signal to Germany’s Jews that the law could easily turn them into strangers again. Through a close reading of this legal controversy, this chapter examines how contemporary secular legal responses to religious infant male circumcision reproduce Christian ambivalence and rely on a supersessionary logic that renders Jews as stuck in a backward past, while constituting the majoritarian secularised Christian culture as a superior locus of equality and progress.

This is the first of two chapters concerned with the Jewish practice of infant male circumcision. In this chapter, I trace the history of circumcision as a trope for Jewish difference in European Christian thought and consider its symbolic role in debates about the legal equality of Jews. Christian thinkers spent much time pondering Jewish circumcision and what it told them about the supposedly ‘carnal’, particularistic, and anachronistic nature of Jews. Apart from constituting a trope for what differentiated Jews from Christians, the bodily sign eventually also became enmeshed in discussions about the possibility of Jewish emancipation where it offered a site to debate the fitness of Jews to become citizens. However, regardless of how much Christians disdained circumcision, they mostly respected the Jewish right to circumcise and due to a curious twist of history, some Christian societies eventually even embraced circumcision themselves. More recently, circumcision has emerged as a human rights issue and I explore the role of Christian ambivalence in contemporary calls for a ban on the practice in the name of children’s rights and gender equality.

This chapter introduces the theoretical literature concerning children’s rights. Although there is now widespread international agreement that children possess human rights, the theoretical underpinning of those rights is often said to be under-theorised. Further, sceptics have questioned whether children’s rights undermine their interests and the central place of the family in protecting those interests. This chapter addresses these debates, considering the theoretical basis on which children hold rights, the content of those rights and the connection between moral rights and international human rights law.

The question of how far the law should intervene in family life to protect children’s rights is controversial. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognises the primary responsibility of parents for their children and the value to children of being brought up in a family that nurtures and protects them. Nevertheless, the reverence given to the place of family also comes with risks to children. While parents are usually best placed to protect their children’s interests, the privacy of family life allows parents to tyrannise, abuse and neglect their children. Legal and political responses are often strongly influenced by notions of family privacy and parental autonomy that discourage interference with family life and instead promote the authority of parents, leaving children vulnerable in the private sphere of the family. This chapter explores the ambivalent current law on parental responsibilities and the rights of children. This is best seen in the law on physical punishment, where parental freedom is prioritised despite substantial evidence of its harmful effects and recognition of children’s right to equal protection from assault in international law.

This concluding chapter draws together themes from across the book and assesses the current health of children’s rights. It opens by considering the extent to which parents’ interests hamper the law’s development of children’s rights. It proceeds to assess the fragmented manner in which children are constructed by law and policy to fulfil adult perceptions of their needs. The difficulties posed by society’s negative attitudes towards young people and their exclusion from the political process are also examined. The chapter concludes by arguing that these problems should be addressed by adopting a more vigorous rights-based perspective and assessing the risks that the current climate of rights scepticism pose for the future of children’s rights.

This chapter considers the role of rights in decisions concerning the health of children who are not yet competent to consent to their own medical treatment. The medical treatment of children is particularly contentious in cases involving disagreement between parents and medical professionals over the provision of life-sustaining treatment. These fraught disputes have often become a site of disagreement over the extent of parental freedom and state intervention in determining children’s best interests. Despite the obvious implications for the child’s own rights to life and bodily integrity, those rights rarely play an overt role in such decisions. A further area of contention is in the extent of parental discretion to consent to non-therapeutic intervention, such as tissue donation or circumcision. These decisions are again treated primarily as a matter of parental discretion; in practice, again the law is content to tolerate significant intervention without adequate protection for the child’s own rights.

This chapter assesses the extent to which children’s rights are protected in domestic law. The heart of the problem for children’s rights in domestic law is that those international rights that are designed for children are not directly enforceable, while those rights that are directly enforceable have not been written for children. Further, the central place of the welfare principle in domestic child law has often been interpreted as being in conflict with a rights-based approach to children. Nevertheless, the Human Rights Act 1998 has been the vehicle for some real advances in protecting children, especially through the use of international instruments in interpreting its rights to be more effective for children. In the political sphere, children’s rights have gained greater influence, especially through the enhanced role of the Children’s Commissioner. This chapter assesses these developments and analyses the continuing weaknesses in the protection for children’s rights in law and policy.

Chapter 3 argues that the Lockean proviso entails two further conclusions embraced by social anarchists. First the chapter argues that, contrary to what right-libertarians typically maintain, the Lockean proviso implies that no one owns any natural resources. This is because any appropriation of such resources would leave others worse off in a way that the proviso does not allow. By contrast, the chapter argues that the proviso is necessarily satisfied when it comes to each agent’s own body ‒ at least, if self-ownership is interpreted in the way proposed in Chapter 1. Thus, while people do not own any external resources, they can easily come to own themselves via acts of self-appropriation. The chapter then goes on to defend at greater length the interpretation of the Lockean proviso proposed in Chapter 1. Finally, it concludes by discussing what the proposed position implies vis-à-vis the rights of children.

Chapter 2 provides a historical overview of childhoods and children, illustrating how the concept of childhood has developed over time. The discussion focusses on how adults working with children, including applied linguists, need to reflect on the implications of their belief systems and their conceptions of children and childhood. The chapter then elaborates on the most notable conceptions of childhood, including the universal view. It then introduces Childhood Studies, a multidisciplinary approach to studying children from bottom up. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and its proposal that children are rights-bearing citizens and their voices must be heard are introduced, and the discussion addresses how the proposed rights can be realised in practice by schools, communities and individual adult researchers. The main contributions of Childhood Studies over the last three and half decades are summarised to draw attention to some current issues and concerns. Finally, the chapter outlines the main components of the extended framework, which includes possibilities for conducting studies not just ‘on’ and ‘about’ but also ‘with’ and ‘by’ children.

This chapter reviews contemporary discussions in political philosophy and educational theory about the character of children’s rights and their importance to debates about the character of democratic education. It focuses on five areas in which there is contestation about the interpretation and implications of children’s rights: (i) issues about the appropriate content of democratic education; (ii) issues about children’s rights of access to education and the degree to which educational inequalities are acceptable; (ii) issues about the kind of control parents should exercise over the kind of education children receive; (iv) issues about the degree to which schools are themselves sites of democratic activity; and (v) issues about how educational institutions should be designed or reformed in order respect the educational rights of children.

A quick glance through history demonstrates that it has not always been an unbroken chain of human happiness, to put it mildly.Different individuals, groups and peoples have faced persecution for any number of reasons: where they came from, how they looked, their perceived (dis)ability, who or what they believed in, who they loved, how they identified, the family they were born into, or, in some cases, for no reason at all. It is against this backdrop that our current set of human rights has emerged. While this chapter focuses primarilyon children’s rights and their relationship with education and educator obligations, it is necessary to understand the history of rights in order to understand why human rights, and particularly children’s rights, are so important to the work we do as educators.

This chapter proposes using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reposition the place of the child in society. Advancements in digital technology and applied statistical analysis offer an opportunity to dislodge the largely entrenched view of the child as an inferior rights holder. As currently positioned, the child’s power is derived from the parent(s) or legal guardian(s). This currently accepted derivative power structure limits the child’s autonomy to wield power independently from the parent. This structure was successful in the past. However, technological advances and the modern child’s dependence on digital resources requires a re-examination of this parent-based derivative power structure. Parents may now have less capability to perform protective and preparatory duties owed to children in the digital context. An analysis of the parent as gatekeeper for participatory rights in the modern digital context is critiqued and the ability of AI to alleviate this problem is proposed.

Argued October 13, 1992.Decided March 23, 1993.

CHACÓN, J. delivered the opinion of the Court.1

This case concerns the liberty interests of children who are being detained by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS or “the Service”) pursuant to 8 C.F.R. § 242.24 (1988). These children pose no risk of flight and no threat of harm to themselves or to others. Responsible adults are available to receive and care for them. But because they are not citizens and have no legal guardians who can claim them, they are currently being detained, often in troubling conditions, while the government determines whether they are to be deported.

Courts are regularly called upon to make judgments on aspects of children’s upbringing, particularly where parents separate and there are disputes around where children will live. In this chapter, the children’s rights issues which arise in cases regarding children’s upbringing are considered; particularly where they intersect with issues concerning elements of the discipline of psychology. Following an exploration of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its impact on the lives of children, two of the most important principles in the CRC are considered – the best interest principle (Art. 3) and principle of respect for the views of the child (Art. 12). The chapter then examines how an enhanced awareness and understanding of developmental psychology has impacted cases concerning children’s upbringing. Particularly contested issues in the area are then examined – children’s attachment to caregivers, children’s own wishes, shared residence and perceptions of mothers versus fathers.