Handbook of Children's Rights: Global and Multidisciplinary Perspectives [Hardback]

While the notion of young people as individuals worthy of rights and freedoms is of relatively recent origin, over the past several decades there has been a substantial increase in both social and political commitment to children’s rights, including those rights that, in the past, were typically only accorded to adults. Contemporary thinking about children’s rights is marked by a tension between the founding focus on children’s protection and the emergent emphasis on children’s participation and self-determination. This tension at the heart of all modern conceptualizations of children’s rights precludes any simple consensus in the field, and a single, up-to-date collection that covers the major issues and policy debates that comprise the current discourse is desperately needed. The International Handbook of Children’s Rights finally meets this need.

The Handbook contains six sections ranging from a section on historical and contemporary perspectives of children’s rights and the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), to a section on the global perspectives on children’s rights, to a section on children’s own voices and perspectives. It features a fantastic mix of over 50 children’s rights experts from over a dozen countries from five continents, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. The Handbook goes beyond conventional coverage of the CRC to delve deeply into the key issues and debates surrounding children’s rights, including:

• the best interests of the child

• the evolving capacities of the child

• states’ rights versus children’s rights

• children’s rights versus parental or family rights

• children as citizens

• children’s rights versus children’s responsibilities

• the balance between protection and participation

There is no volume like this one in its multidisciplinarity, its international range, its inclusion of both the qualitative and quantitative, or its steady attention to policy and practice as well as to theory and empirical evidence. TheInternational Handbook of Children’s Rights is an indispensible resource for researchers, professionals, policy-makers, NGOs, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students, as well as anyone else keenly interested in the growing research and scholarship on children’s rights.