Explore the vast range of titles available.

This edited collection tells the story behind a ground-breaking Welsh law which reinforces the human rights of children and young people in Welsh devolved government, examines the impact of this law in selected policy areas and shows why the Welsh approach is attracting worldwide interest.

Protecting children's rights and interests, especially within families, is crucial globally. Effective laws and enforcement are needed to ensure their safety and prevent violence, both offline and online. Kazakhstan's efforts in this regard, including legal protection for motherhood and childhood, are important. All of the above allowed for formulating the general purpose of the study – a comprehensive systematic examination of the protection of the subjective rights and legitimate interests of the child in family legal relations and in surrounding society (using the example of the Republic of Kazakhstan). The results were obtained using the tools of theoretical and methodological research of publications devoted to the problems and issues of observance and protection of children's rights and freedoms at the national and global levels, methods of comparative legal and comparative political research, content analysis of official documents, etc. In the study, key issues regarding the protection of children's rights in Kazakhstan were identified, including violence, neglect, and juvenile delinquency. It highlighted the growing number of appeals for the protection of violated children's rights and emphasized the urgent need for improvement in the child protection system. Promising areas for development include enhancing social services, reducing violence in families and institutions, improving legal protection against sexual harassment, and promoting child-friendly activities in preschool education. The study is of both theoretical interest and practical importance for various stakeholders involved in child welfare and protection. The research has practical value and originality in posing individual questions; it is aimed at examining in-depth the most important problems of maternity, family, and childhood protection in modern Kazakhstan.

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the number of cases being brought before national courts addressing the constitutional rights of children and future generations (FG) in the context of environmental protection. These cases have required courts to devote increasing attention to a wide-ranging and complicated array of constitutional rights claims involving the short- and longer-term impacts of environmental harm on children and FG. This article argues that both litigation and judicial efforts in this area have been hampered by the lack of precision of definitions of ‘future generations’ under comparative constitutional and international human rights law, in particular vis-à-vis children. This lack of precision poses a major challenge to both the delineation and enforcement of rights claims in the context of such litigation. After outlining how these cases are being brought and how courts are addressing (or not) the complexities involved in defining children and FG respectively, the article highlights the lack of authoritative definitions of FG in comparative constitutional law – a lacuna that, the author argues, is exacerbated by the ongoing lack of a clear definition of FG in the international human rights law context. The article concludes by identifying key challenges faced by litigators and courts seeking to engage with the rights of children and FG that result from this definitional gap.

This paper provides a critical perspective on the decolonisation of children's rights. The research is a comparative analysis between the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC) and the United Nations, Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). It explores the progress and challenges on addressing children's rights within the context of Africa. The paper explores the limitations faced by African scholars to promote research on children's rights. These limitations include lack of funding and imposed conditions on research projects. Subsequently, without addressing such barriers studies on children's rights remain dominated by an imperialist approach anchored on colonialism. An important point to draw from this paper is the need to promote African research, which does not seek to re-write history, but offers an alternative view which contextualises the realities faced by children in Africa. The paper recommends the need to reframe hegemonic epistemologies on children's rights to accommodate the needs and challenges of children in the Global South.

Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children’s rights activists’ efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago’s moral and political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local child protection aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people’s voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children’s views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children’s lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people’s well-being.  

In April 2018, the US government introduced a ‘zero tolerance’ illegal immigration control strategy at the US-Mexico border resulting in the detention of all adults awaiting federal prosecution for illegal entry and the subsequent removal of their children to separate child shelters across the USA. By June 2018, over 2300 immigrant children, including infants, had been separated from their parents for immigration purposes. Media reports and scenes of distraught families ignited global condemnation of US immigration policy and fresh criticism of immigration detention practices.Detention of children for immigration purposes is known to be practised in over 100 countries worldwide, despite a significant body of research demonstrating the extensive harm of such policies. This review explores and contextualises the key potential impacts of family separation and detention of children for immigration purposes including damaged attachment relationships, traumatisation, toxic stress and wider detrimental impacts on immigrant communities. As such, it is critical for host nation governments to cease the practice of family separation and child detention for immigration control and promote postmigration policies that protect children from further harm, promote resilience and enable recovery.

This review focuses on students' perceptions of their rights in elementary and secondary schools. The conceptual framework of rights consciousness was applied to understand how students' knowledge, experiences, and emotions shape their rights perceptions. The analysis is based on 38 empirical studies conducted in different countries. The findings characterize students' rights perceptions as intuitive—that is, perceptions that are not grounded in legal rules but in students' personal insights. The findings also identify key factors affecting students' perceptions: school context, national context, and students' individual characteristics. The conclusions underscore that school rights-based practices, student body and school staff diversity, and school relationships influence students' rights consciousness. However, questions remain concerning how students' perceptions are affected by cultural repertoires religion, socioeconomic status, gender, and age. The implications are that future studies should apply a context-based agenda to inform the design a implementation of human rights education programs and rights-based organizational practices.

Context The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children have the right to be heard in all matters affecting them. The Convention inspired a surge in research that investigates young people's perspectives on health and wellness‐related concerns and that involves children as ‘co‐researchers'. Young people's advisory groups (YPAGs) are a widely used method to enable young people's involvement in all research stages, but there is a lack of academic literature to guide researchers on how to set up, run and evaluate the impact of such groups. Objective In this paper, we provide a step‐by‐step model, grounded in our own experience of setting up and coordinating the Oxford Neuroscience, Ethics and Society Young People's Advisory Group (NeurOx YPAG). This group supports studies at the intersection of ethics, mental health and novel technologies. Our model covers the following stages: deciding on the fit for co‐production, recruiting participants, developing collective principles of work, running a meeting and evaluating impact. Results We emphasize that throughout this process, researchers should take a critical stance by reflecting on whether a co‐production model fits their research scope and aims; ensuring (or aspiring to) representativeness within the group; valuing different kinds of expertise; and undertaking on‐going evaluations on the impact of the group on both the young people and the research. Conclusion Adopting a critical and reflective attitude can increase researchers' capacity to engage youth in democratic and inclusive ways, and to produce research outputs that are aligned with the target audience's needs and priorities.

Children and young people constitute more than one quarter of all plaintiffs in rights-based strategic climate litigation cases filed globally up to 2021. This article examines the implications of this development for children's environmental rights inside and outside the courtroom, relying on the analysis of case documents, media coverage, and the broader literature on strategic climate litigation and children's rights. The article finds that children are well placed to make powerful arguments for intergenerational justice. Conversely, children's rights arguments that address their current-day grievances are under-utilized. More consistent inclusion of these types of claim could strengthen children's environmental rights, clarifying and enforcing legal obligations towards children in the context of the climate crisis as it unfolds. The involvement of children in strategic climate litigation, moreover, can advance the critical role of this demographic as stakeholder in climate solutions. However, the participation of children also raises ethical and practical dilemmas, which are currently poorly understood and only haphazardly addressed.