The monist construction of the child-rights identity serves an important purpose of shielding the child from the harmful and abusive social and traditional practices that is part of the everyday life of so many children. However, its downside is that it does not allow children to exercise self-determination in the shaping of their own identity. The power to shape your identity sits at the heart of modern democracy and ideas of inclusion and equality. Complex intersectionality will allow the child to both maintain the protection that comes with its monist construction while also allowing for self-determination that takes the social context of the concrete child into consideration. This together with a deliberate practice of self-critique to challenge false hegemonic consciousness of the image of the child it thinks it serves. This might prepare child rights to serve a forceful and relevant theory for advocates to lean on when we are entering the full effects of the climate crisis, and this will be the most significant stress test of our democratic system we as a world community have experienced to this day.

Violence and time are elements shaping the lives of children. For children, time is something that to a large part is placed in the future, while to adults, it is placed in the past; still, it is within this time that violence directed toward children occurs because they are children, often with the purpose of shaping their personhood and controlling them. To be able to speak freely about how time and violence socially construct the self-identity as a child is an important act of resistance against the use of violence constructing childhood but also an important form of protection. To fight violence, the child rights discourse must move beyond the child’s rights to be heard to also take seriously the right to freedom of speech.