Abstract
Research on human rights has often focused on civil, political, and personal integrity rights to the exclusion of other categories of rights. Children’s rights have been one of these often-overlooked categories, at least in part because of the much more recent creation of relevant international law. While many practitioners do work to further children’s enjoyment of their rights, this has not been reflected with widespread, global measurement efforts by quantitative scholars. In this review, we first argue for the importance of measuring children’s rights. We then present several paths for translating international law into quantitative measurements, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each approach generally and with regards to children’s rights more specifically. We explore measurement gaps of children’s rights that remain—coverage of the CRC and across countries and time; considerations of progressive realization and maximum resources; the incorporation of children’s developing capacities; and children’s participation. And we close with recommendations regarding potential avenues for future work on this subject.
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Notes
Well-known measures of physical integrity rights include those produced by the CIRI Human Rights Data Project (Cingranelli et al., 2014) and its successor, CIRIGHTS (Mark et al., 2023); the Human Rights Protection Scores (Fariss, 2014; Fariss et al., 2020); the Ill-Treatment and Torture Data Collection Project (Conrad, Haglund, and Moore 2013, 2014); the Political Terror Scale (Gibney et al., 2019); and Varieties of Democracy’s personal integrity rights measures (Coppedge et al., 2021; Pemstein et al., 2021).
Examples come from the CIRIGHTS measures of empowerment and justice rights (Mark et al., 2023), the CIVICUS Monitor (CIVICUS, 2020), the Human Rights Measurement Initiative’s (HRMI) Empowerment and Safety from the State scores (Brook et al., 2018; Clay et al., 2020; Clay et al., 2023; HRMI, 2023; Rains et al., 2023), Freedom House’s (2020) Freedom in the World scores, the Varieties of Democracy measures of civil liberty (Coppedge et al., 2021; Pemstein et al., 2021), and the World Justice Project’s (2021) Rule of Law Index.
Some of the most notable economic rights measurement projects include CIRIGHTS’ measures of workers’ rights, HRMI’s Quality of Life measures (HRMI, 2023; Randolph et al., 2023); and the Social and Economic Rights Fulfillment Index (Fukuda-Parr et al., 2015; Economic & Social Rights Empowerment Initiative, 2023).
The most widely used physical integrity rights measures, for example, do not disaggregate by identities of affected individuals (Fariss, 2014; Gibney et al., 2019; Fariss et al., 2020; Mark et al., 2023), and where such disaggregation is available, children are typically not an included category (Conrad et al., 2013, 2014). These coding choices are made, at least in part, because many of these measures are focused on the actions of government actors, and children are perceived as being less likely to experience abuse by government agents as part of the dissent-repression nexus and more likely to experience it at the hands of family members or other caregivers.
For civil and political rights, the legal voting age is set at 18 in the majority of countries, which means that scores for electoral and other political processes are unlikely to capture children’s experiences. Aggregate measures of economic rights do generally include some measure of respect for children’s rights, such as access to education or stunting rates (Fukuda-Parr et al., 2015; Economic & Social Rights Empowerment Initiative, 2023; Randolph et al., 2023). But high scores on indicators more indicative of adults’ enjoyment of their rights may result in aggregate scores high enough to avoid general scrutiny, and the inclusion of only a few indicators of children’s rights fails to measure the fullness of their experiences.
This definition comes directly from Article 1 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and can be contrasted with Article 2 of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, which states that a child is any person under the age of eighteen, with no exceptions (OAU 1990).
Despite this accepted definition, controversies remain regarding when childhood begins (as there is no minimum age set), when it ends (since states can establish a lower age of majority), and how children change and develop in the time between (in order to account for cultural differences and acknowledge the evolving capacities of the child) (Peleg, 2019).
See Peleg (2019) for a longer discussion of each principle.
It should be noted that this period was not without controversy and disagreement about children’s rights. Many of these discussions were inevitably carried over into the CRC. See Doek (2019) for a brief overview.
As the first international document to create binding obligations (Carvalho, 2008), the CRC is our main document of focus here, but it should be noted that there are also several regional children’s rights documents that deserve attention. Children’s rights have been further articulated and implemented through the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC), the European Convention on the Exercise of Children’s Rights, The American Convention on Human Rights, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Plan of Action on the Elimination of Violence Against Children, and the Arab Charter on Human Rights (Doek, 2019). Additionally, children’s rights are enumerated in broader human rights treaties, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (See, for example, Gran et al., 2013).
Carvalho (2008) provides an overview on the distinction between monitoring, measurement, and indicators.
Childwatch’s International Indicators for Children’s Rights project, one of the earliest attempts to identify a robust list of indicators for monitoring children’s rights (Carvalho, 2008), identifies five key components of any attempt to monitor these rights: (1) baseline performance information (to compare a country’s future performance to); (2) an integrated system of indicators; (3) disaggregated data (to determine if some groups are experiencing differential violations of their rights); (4) an integrated set of age ranges (to account for experiences of rights at different levels of development); and (5) children-centered statistics (rather than general statistics or statistics focused on adults) (Ennew, 1997).
Landman (2004) creates a similar breakdown by discussing that rights can be measured in principle, in practice, and as policy outcomes.
See UN OHCHR (2012) for more details on their RIGHTS criteria for selecting human rights indicators.
See Barry et al. (2022) for children’s employment outcomes.
Although the enabling environment criterion is based on coded reports from the CRC Committee, the overall measure is focused on outcomes.
The emerging GlobalChild Project presents a very thorough framework of each type of indicator (structural, process, and outcome) that could be collected for all of the rights in the CRC but does not (yet) present how a measure might be constructed from such indicators (Early Childhood Rights Indicators Group 2010; Vaghri et al., 2022; Vaghri et al., 2019). Another example of a comprehensive framework can be found in Carvalho, 2008.
An arithmetic mean requires adding all of a series of values together and then dividing by the number of values. A geometric mean is calculated by multiplying a series of values together and then taking the nth root of the result (where n is the number of values in the series).
Abuses of “bodily or physical integrity” have received much of the attention (Murdie & Watson, 2021).
Interestingly, the authors did find that non-participatory research could still be respectful of children’s rights. Seven studies that were coded as having “children as objects of research” were also coded as respectful of children’s rights, because they “were concerned with recognizing and valuing the child’s experience, considering ethical issues, acknowledging children as both vulnerable and competent, minimizing intrusion by researchers into the ‘everyday’ operation of the research setting, and reporting of data in non-judgmental ways” (Mayne & Howitt, 2015, p. 36).
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Elizabeth Kaletski and K. Anne Watson had the idea for the review article. All authors contributed to the literature search, drafted, and revised the work.
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Kaletski, E., Watson, K.A. & Hawley, V. Quantifications of the Rights of the Child: Lessons Learned and Moving Forward. Child Ind Res 17, 483–508 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-023-10096-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-023-10096-0