Human Rights in Children's Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law

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Human Rights in Children's Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law

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How can children grow to realize their inherent rights and respect the rights of others? In this book, authors Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham explore this question through both human rights law and children's literature.

Both international and domestic law affirm that children have rights, but how are these norms disseminated so that they make a difference in children's lives? Human rights education research demonstrates that when children learn about human rights, they exhibit greater self-esteem and respect the rights of others.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child-the most widely-ratified human rights treaty-not only ensures that children have rights, it also requires that states make those rights "widely known, by appropriate and active means, to adults and children alike." This first-of-its-kind requirement for a human rights treaty indicates that if rights are to be meaningful to the lives of children, then government and civil society must engage with those rights in ways that are relevant to children.

Human Rights in Children's Literature investigates children's rights under international law - identity and family rights, the right to be heard, the right to be free from discrimination, and other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights - and considers the way in which those rights are embedded in children's literature from Peter Rabbit to Horton Hears a Who! to Harry Potter.

This book traverses children's rights law, literary theory, and human rights education to argue that in order for children to fully realize their human rights, they first have to imagine and understand them.
Foreword by Carol Bellamy, Former Executive Director of UNICEF
Preface by Jonathan Todres
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Making Children's Rights Widely Known
Chapter 2: Participation Rights and the Voice of the Child
Chapter 3: Confronting Discrimination, Pursuing Equality
Chapter 4: Identity Rights and Family Rights
Chapter 5: Civil and Political Rights of Children: Accountability with Dignity
Chapter 6: Securing Child Well-being: The Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights of the Child
Chapter 7: Adults in the World of Children's Literature
Chapter 8: Reading, Rights, and the Best Interests of the Child
Appendix 1: United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
Appendix 2: Discrimination against Children
Appendix 3: Cinderella around the World
Appendix 4: Empirical Study: How Children Interpret Human Rights in Stories
Children's Literature Bibliography
Bibliography
For more information
Index
Jonathan Todres is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law. His research focuses on children's rights and child well-being. Professor Todres has published more than fifty articles on children's rights, child trafficking and related forms of exploitation, legal and cultural constructs of childhood, and human rights in children's literature. He is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.

Sarah Higinbotham is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her scholarship centers on the intersections of literature and law. She has written about the violence of the law in early modern England, critical prison theory, and human rights in children's literature. She teaches at a men's prison outside Atlanta and works actively with an Atlanta nonprofit that benefits children who have an incarcerated parent.
"Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham reveal in this remarkable and long overdue book [that] the content of children's literature is crucial. It matters for the children concerned and, by extension, for the very nature of the societies in which they grow up. It helps children to understand that they have rights, and that these rights are important. Children's literature has a pivotal role to play in forging that early sense of self-worth, and Jonathan and Sarah are to be congratulated for shining a new light on a role that has, until now, been under-appreciated".
(From the Foreword)
-Carol Bellamy, Former Executive Director of UNICEF

"Human Rights in Children's Literature is an important book for educators and anyone who believes that society is better off when everyone knows their rights and then adults are expected to talk about and teach rights to the next generation. This original inquiry combines children's rights, human rights, and literary theory with the larger purpose of finding better ways to teach human- and children's- rights in a timely manner to young people. The authors are interested in advancing children's rights by striving to enforce an under-appreciated principle in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child - a requirement that people (children and adults alike) be informed of their rights. Instead of focusing on what rights children have or ought to have, this books asks us to consider why it is important to teach young people what are their rights. This could transform society, leading to citizens expecting and demanding that their rights be honored." -Martin Guggenheim, NYU Law

"The relationship between human rights and children's literature is of the utmost importance to all those with an interest in either. Human Rights in Children's Literature is the first book to comprehensively reflect on the influence and interpenetration of the discourse of rights and the experience of literature in the moral development of children. The authors reveal a powerful sensitivity to the deep emotional undertow that the books we read in childhood instil in us and exert over us all of our lives. At the same time they demonstrate a sophisticated understanding not only of the theoretical and legal framework of human rights, but of the actual experiences of vulnerable children around the world. Those children, and our own, deserve no less." -Professor Desmond Manderson, Australian National University

"In this wonderful and wonder-filled book, two gifted scholars take the abstract concept of rights for children and bring it to life through the books children love. It is much more than a scholarly study. It is a roadmap for action. Not your grandmother's two dimensional paper roadmap, but a 21st century navigator speaking in voices that are funny, frightened, angry, sad, brave, and joyful to guide us on the path to implementation of children's rights as human rights." -Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, L. Q. C. Lamar Professor of Law, Director Child Rights Project, Emory University School of Law