Transcript Document

Children’s rights-based
participation in
advocacy
Professor Laura Lundy and Dr Chelsea Marshall
Centre for Children’s Rights
Queen’s University, Belfast
www.qub.ac.uk/ccr
The Centre for Children’s Rights:
Who we are and what we do
Implementing Children’s Rights - using the United Nations Convention on
the Rights of the Child and other relevant international human rights
standards to evaluate the laws, policies and practices which affect
children.
Research with Children - evaluating and using the best methods of
conducting research into children’s lives with a particular focus on
approaches which involve children actively in the process.
Training and education on children’s rights – providing high quality
training and education programmes at Masters and Doctoral level. We
have a new Masters in Children’s Rights and are developing open access
on-line training on the UNCRC.
Overview
• Why do we need to involve children and young
people in advocacy?
• What are the key features of child rights-based
participation as they relate to advocacy?
• A good example of children participating in
advocacy.
• What matters to children and young people
themselves?
Why should children and young
people be involved in advocacy for
their rights?
It is core to a ‘rights-based’ approach
 Activity should further the realisation of human/children’s
rights
 Human/children’s rights standards should guide all phases of
activity
 The activity should contribute to the development of the
capacities of the duty-bearers to meet their obligations and
of the rights-holders to claim their rights
UN Statement of
Common Understanding on a
Human Rights-Based Approach
(The Stamford Agreement)
They are entitled to be involved
States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his
or her own views the right to express those views
freely in all matters affecting the child, the views
of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and
maturity of the child
(Article 12, UNCRC)
It supports the realisation of their
other rights
More relevant
claims
Better informed
decisions
Increased
accountability
of duty-bearers
The key features of children’s
rights-based participation
UN Committee on the Rights of the
Child, General Comment No. 12.
(2009)
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Transparent and informative
Voluntary
Respectful
Relevant
Facilitated with child-friendly working methods.
Inclusive
Supported by training
Safe and sensitive to risk.
Accountable.
(for advice on implementation see:
Gerison Lansdown (2011), The Child’s Right to be Heard, UNICEF and Save
the Children.
Voice is not enough…
Lundy (2007)
VOICE
SPACE
Safe and inclusive
opportunity to
form and express
a view
The right
to express
views
Facilitated to
express views
freely in medium of
choice
ARTICLE 12
AUDIENCE
The view must be
listened to
The right to
have views
given due
INFLUENCE
weight
The view must be
acted upon
A good example of children’s
rights-based advocacy
Advancing Children’s Rights
• 2013/2014 Project funded by Atlantic Philanthropies
• Collaboration between the Centre for Children’s Rights at Queen’s
University, Belfast and Child Law Clinic, University College Cork
• Capturing the learning in relation to children’s rights advocacy of 18
organisations working in Ireland, North and South through
interviews with Directors, Staff and children and young people
involved in advocacy.
• Further information available on
www.advancingchildrensrights.com
Children and Youth Led Advocacy on
the adequacy of school counselling
services
Young people from
Children’s Law Centre, (NI)
• Child-led topic: Chose the issue that
they wanted to work on.
• Peer research: survey with over 1000
young people.
• Child-friendly dissemination:
presented the findings in drama and a
child-friendly written report
• Engaged directly with duty-bearers:
direct dialogue with the Head of
Service and Minister for Education.
What matters to children and young
people themselves in terms of their
participation in advocacy?
Group Session 1: Advocacy with
children who do not communicate in
‘typical’ ways.
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Children with physical disabilities
Children who speak a minority language
Children with learning disabilities
Children who are averse to social interaction
The very young
Others?
Children with learning difficulties
• Ask children themselves
about their preferred
way of communicating.
• If this isn’t possible,
take advice from those
who know best- their
teachers, parents or
carers.
The ‘banana’ bus
“We are embarrassed on that bus…
We hide under the seats”
The very young
The Committee on the
Rights of the Child has
observed that younger
children: ‘make choices
and communicate their
feelings, ideas and wishes
in numerous ways, long
before they are able to
communicate through the
conventions of spoken or
written language’
GC7, 2005, para. 11
Group work: session 1.
• In small groups, imagine that you have been asked to consult with
children aged 4-5, in socially disadvantaged areas
• You want to find out what things they find hard in the first year of
kindergarten in order to advocate for an after-school programme which
helps them settle into school.
• Note: these children cannot read; most cannot count; and not all will want
to draw pictures. Resources are unlimited.
Taking advice from children.
Children’s advisory groups are one way of involving
children in all stages of the process.
In a project for Barnardo’s NI, we worked with an advisory
group of four children aged 4-5 who advised at all stages:
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Questions to be asked.
Methods to be used.
Interpretation of findings.
Dissemination of results.
Choosing the items for the picture
survey
Engagement in the choice of methods
• The CRAG suggested that
“circle time” would be a good
way of finding out other
children’s views.
• Their choice counteracted
some of the recognised
disadvantages of group
interviews
Engagement in the interpretation of
the data
Engagement in dissemination
Group work: session 2.
Scaling up:
How to involve larger
numbers of children and
young people.
Why?
• More inclusive
• More persuasive
How?
• Public campaigns
• Surveys
• Social media
How can children lead or be meaningfully
involved in these?
Child-led campaigns
Surveys
• Advantage: Most obvious to include greater numbers and
be able to generalise.
• Disadvantage: often needs technical expertise in questionwriting and analysis that can be outside the capacity of
staff and children.
• Worth checking out free on-line questionnaires such as
Survey Monkey.
• May be off-putting for children to do … but the way to try
and address this obvious…
Involving children in survey design
Providing space to express views
freely
Encouraging fuller responses
Participant responses in ‘free response’ boxes were noticeably more
extensive and detailed: participants wrote an average of 15 words in their
responses compared to an average of 6.4 words when other children’s views
not provided.
• ‘i would assess science by doing a project and getting marks on that and maybe
have a small test after. The project could be like a rivision thing but better and
funner’.
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‘I would let the children bring their own experiments into the classroom and explain
how to do them. I would encourage them to research new ideas to make it
enjoyable and interesting’
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‘I would ask the class how they would like to do it’
Social media
Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiHp4Zlb9
mg
Thunderclap via Twitter
• What was one of the
most successful Twitter
campaigns in 2013?
• … beating Dove Natural
Beauty?!
UNICEF INDIA
The #AWAAZDO hashtag received
1,525 mentions and the
@UNICEFIndia Twitter account gained
over 2000 followers. The campaign
itself also received 60,540 impressions
on Twitter, as it was calculated using
Tweetreach. By the end of the
campaign, the Awaaz Do website also
got 203,248 signups of people
interested in joining a good cause.
Group-work activity 2.
Good
Fast
Cheap
Choose TWO!
Reducing the voting age to 16 –
involving as many children as you can.
• Group 1. Good and fast and not cheap. There is a 12 week
consultation period on proposed legislation. Budget is not an issue.
• Group 2. Good and cheap but slow. There is no proposal to do
this in government but the young people you work with want to
work on this issue. You have very little money but time is not an
issue.
• Group 3. Good and fast and cheap. Like group 1 –except you have
no money!
• Group 4. Cheap, fast and not good. Like group 3 except bad.
Session 3. Including marginalised
children
• Who are they in your
communities?
• Who works with and for them?
• Do they have “consultation
fatigue?”
• What can be done to support
their right to participate?
Session 4: Having impact
What are the best ways of ensuring that dutybearers take children’s views seriously and act
upon them?
Getting an upfront commitment
41
Face to Face contact
• In the past year for example I can think of conversations I’ve
had with children and young people and they weren’t like
[consultation events]. They were proper business meetings
where we sat down and talked very seriously about their
situations and in those meetings I got to hear probably
some of the most salient pieces of information about policymaking that I needed to... (Government representative)
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• … to have the Education Minister there as well was brilliant
and to get his immediate feedback – just the presentation
and then he was on the spot... (Young person)
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Group activity 4
Share some examples of practices that you
think were effective or ineffective in ensuring
that duty-bearers responded to children’s rights
advocacy.
What makes duty-bearers not just listen but
act?