Children's Human Rights: Challenging Global Barriers to the Child Liberation Movement
by Dr Sonja Grover

Grover’s Children’s Human Rights: Challenging Global Barriers to the Child Liberation Movement, examines some of the barriers globally to children realizing their fundamental human rights entitlements. It offers insight into how and why it is that as Carol Bellamy former director of UNICEF put it: “Too many governments are making informed, deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood.”

The arguments in this book furthermore challenge some of the key assumptions, beliefs, policy, law and practices that pose barriers to progress toward children’s enjoyment of their human rights. Children’s rights are advanced in the book as universal human rights rather than as a separable or novel category of rights. The argument is made that the denial of the universality of children’s basic human rights is itself a colonial perspective.

Children’s rights are found to be currently under attack from every angle. This includes, for instance, from segments of the academic community, the courts, State governments and even the international community which has in many respects created a system which provides inadequate protection even in principle for most of the world’s children. Children are found to be declared adults by State governments when it suits State interests for military purposes, to serve economic objectives or to appease various traditional cultural groups.

The illegitimacy of these attacks is addressed and a call to children’s human rights advocacy advanced in their stead with a special focus on the need for judicial activism in ensuring that children lay claim to their fundamental human rights as persons and their birthright as first class global citizens.

Dr. Grover is currently an Associate Professor of Education at Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada. She has published extensively on the topic of children’s human rights in leading refereed human rights, law and education journals. Her research is interdisciplinary focusing on global and domestic issues concerning the rights of children with a particular emphasis on marginalized child groups.

Dr. Grover is also a psychologist with frontline experience with children and families in crisis and has worked in diverse clinical settings in Canada and New Zealand.

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