Children’s Power to Challenge Authority

Abstract

Child rights can be considered through the different characteristics of human rights, according to the classification “3P” as Protection, Provision, and Participation. The (potential) distinction between child rights and human rights recalls the former perspective about children’s not seen as human beings. The development of the fields on childhood studies such as “children’s participation” and “agency” are also related to the concept “empowerment,” which indicates the power relations between children and grown-ups. The main purpose of this paper is to debate all those notions through the children’s own experiences by referring to various examples in the frame of Power of children as the Fourth-P right. After discussing how children have the power to “challenge the authority,” I will indicate some examples from Little Review, as a remarkable experience of children’s participation. Lastly, I will try to reveal what today’s children consider the topic of child rights by sharing the findings of a pilot research with children, which I realized in 2019 December. In this study, twelve children who were 11-year-old then, wrote their commentaries about children’s rights and the requirements to have the rights. Thus, in the final part of this paper, the rights will be addressed through children’s perspectives.

Childhood Experience in the middle of the Uncertainty

“…Çocuk meclislerinin ilksel örnekleri elbette tarih boyunca var, bilhassa yine sözleşmeye ilham kaynağı olan, Janusz Korczak'ın iki dünya savaşı arasında açtığı yetimhane ve bu mekânda bir araya gelen çocukların fiziksel, sosyal, psikolojik gereksinimlerinin sağlamasının yanı sıra, onlara düşüncelerini özgürce ifade ettikleri bir alan sunulması önemli örnekler arasında sıralanabilir (Vucic & Sekowska, 2020;Demiral, 2021). Savaş sonrası istikrarsızlık zamanında, fiziksel koşulların dahi elverişli olmadığı bir dönemde çocukların birey olarak tanındığı ve aynı zamanda sosyal hayattaki rollerini kazandığı bir ortamlarının olması bu açıdan ilginç ve değerlidir.…”