In the technological world we live in today, were parents fawn over their offspring. Even, posting their child’s picture on Facebook before the child has even opened his/her eyes. It is hard to believe that children were not always thought of as precious. According to Pinker, it wasn’t until the nineteen hundreds that there were any ideas of children’s rights (Pinker, 2012). So what are children’s rights? Most research will tell you is most of what is covered in children’s rights is simply the right to not be beaten or abused and to be treated as a human being. Child abuse is still a problem in today’s society but it has indeed come a far way.
Historically there are many things that we consider child abuse now, that was probably not considered child abuse at the time of the abuse. Pinker explains some forms of child abuse when he states that,
“Though infanticide is the most extreme form of maltreatment of children, our cultural heritage tells of many others, including the sacrifice of children to gods; the sale of children into slavery, marriage, and religious servitude; the exploitation of children to clean chimneys and crawl through tunnels in coal mines; and the subjection of children to forms of corporal punishment that verge on or cross over to torture”(Pinker, 2012).
Thankfully, all of these practices are now considered illegal at least in the US. However, it took time and effort to get to where we are today. Infanticide was extremely common in Greek, Roman and Medieval times and continued into the Enlightenment period. Mothers would murder their babies for reasons like, deformities, no father, was fathered by a man who was not the husband, no economic support. Infanticide used to be see as a necessary evil in some cases, where the mother who kills her child even grieves over it. Physical abuse of children was also seen as necessary. There are many older sayings such as, “Better whipt than Damn’d”(Pinker, 2012). Beating children was considered by most as necessary to beat the evil devil out of them. The first major shift against committing child abuse did not come until 1693.
There have been many major figures in the fight for children’s rights the first few are John Locke, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Ellen McCormack and her lawyer Elbridge Thomas Gerry. “John Locke [the author of] Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which was published in 1693… [discussed] the idea that the way children are treated determines the kinds of adults they grow into”(Pinker, 2012). What Locke wrote is considered common knowledge today, back then however, it was a brand new idea. William Wordsworth, another major figure was the inventor of the phrase that explains childhood,“The child is father of the man.”(Pinker, 2012). And Rousseau further changed the world by writing about childhood innocence and not the Christian idea of original sin. The biggest step for children’s rights was made in 1874, by a ten year old, who stepped up to accuse her adoptive parents of abuse and her name was Mary Ellen McCormack. Her testimony and the help of her lawyer Elbridge Thomas Gerry, put into flewision the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. As the 19th century continued, many more places like the one created by McCormack and Gerry spread all around the world.
The United Nation made children’s rights into law and the child welfare system in America was created to protect children from abusive parents. Poland began the lobby for a UN children’s rights treaty after, “over two million Polish children were killed in World War II”(Simon, 2000). “The Convention on the Rights of the Child [the Polish children’s rights treaty submitted to the UN] received acceptance faster than any other human rights treaty”(Simon, 2000). The Convention covered many things including cutting ethnic ties when it comes to child abuse the child’s race is not in question and it also made the harm of children a public issue that must be dealt with by the state. The child welfare system and child protective services are the United State’s attempts to unhold this UN treaty. “While child welfare policies have waxed and waned over time, the overall goal of child welfare legislation is to illuminate the line between acceptable and unacceptable parental behavior”(Yang, & Ortega, 2016). Yang and Ortega go on to explain that there is no doubt, however, that the welfare system has failed many children and will continue to fail by creating environments where there is simply less abuse not none. “Large systemic issues such as foster care drift and poor worker practices are commonplace problems and are only addressed through patchwork legislation”(Yang, & Ortega, 2016). There is much room for improvement within both child welfare and child protective services and although it is flawed, there is always hope for betterment of both programs.
The broken state of the child welfare system had slowed the progress of children’s rights significantly. “Youth in general are considered to be a relatively powerless group in that they do not vote, and that they are dependent on adults, but foster youth are considered by some to be the most powerless group in society”(Yang, & Ortega, 2016). Children in the foster care system who have experienced abuse often times do not know how, to who, or where to report it. Another factor that has slowed the progress of children’s rights is the definition of terms. Over the course of time, “the definition of child maltreatment has changed; typically, maltreatment is often understood as a violation of the parental right to care for and protect a child”(Yang, & Ortega, 2016). Grievously, if the parents are considered to be unfit, then the alternative parental unit is expected to be child protective services.
The decline of child abuse from the 18th century is evident, however, the decline in the abusive act of spanking took longer to follow suit and therefore hindered the progress of children’s rights. Pinker explains that, “[b]efore the early 1980s, around 90 percent of respondents in the English-speaking countries approved of spanking”(Pinker, 2012). Historically, spanking was delivered to a misbehaving child on his/her buttox and could be done with one's hand, a belt, a stick, or any other weapon of choice. It was not until around 1979 that spanking began to decrease greatly. “The United Nations and the European Union have called on all their member nations to abolish spanking”(Pinker, 2012). This prohibition changed the way children were parented. Although, child abuse and specifically spanking is still a problem today there is significantly less spanking and less approval toward spanking than in the recent past.
Throughout history children’s rights have increased extremly when compared to the past, but what does the future hold? Now we consider children as precious and educate them and parents on how to protect your child from any harm. But, too much protection can turn into a bad thing. Pinker states that,
“The campaign for perfect safety from abductions ignores costs like constricting childhood experience, increasing childhood obesity, instilling chronic anxiety in working women, and scaring young adults away from having children”(Pinker, 2012).
Although, children can be abducted, living life in fear of something that most likely will not happen is no way to live life or to instill in children to live their lives. “The long history of childhood [rights] discloses…how doing good for children often has gone terribly wrong” (McGillivray, 2013). Science fiction movies are rapidly becoming our reality and in the future the discussion of children’s rights may extend into the medical ethics of gene splicing. Gene splicing is basically changing the genes of a fetus in vitro. If this is allowed, gene splicing can correct genes that code for deformities, metabolic diseases, autism, down syndrome and other genetic diseases. The question is, where do we stop? If gene splice becomes a thing things can also be changed like the sex of the child, hair color, eye color, skin color, expected height, expected weight. In the future when this is possible the question of whether this violates the rights of the yet to be born child has to be answered. Still today, the rights of unborn babies are being discussed in the pro-life or pro-choice debate. The world knows enough not to backslide into beating children, but there will be new issues that concern children’s rights in the future. History shows us how far children’s rights have come, from frequent abuse and neglect to almost over protection and worship. McGillivray discusses how children’s rights must be, “disentangled from those of the parent, Salvationist, state and corporation, and set fully into the bio-social”(McGillivray, 2013). The point of children’s rights is that children have the right to have the same human rights as adults because they are no less human. “For the most fragile and least understood members of our species, rights are a matter of life or death.”(McGillivary, 2013). Children’s rights have come far but have much more space and need for improvement. In the future we our society will be written about just like Pinker wrote about the past and how we treat our children will be judged.