A child’s right to participate: Implications for international child protection

Child protection is an essential international policy and programming priority involving various efforts. While different actors attempt to redress child protection issues, it is unclear how they appreciate and respect child participation in their work. Consequently, the essential question for this article is how child participation is understood and implemented in international child protection efforts. The child’s rights to participate and to protection are included in several provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and other international human rights instruments. Due to numerous benefits, much literature and various actors and organisations support the role and value of child participation. Nevertheless, child participation poses a significant challenge in practice for various reasons including age discrimination, denial of opportunities, as well as tokenistic and irrelevant participatory efforts. Accordingly, this article reviews the international human rights framework and the literature in order to obtain a thorough understanding of how participation and protection are defined and practiced in international child protection efforts and the implications for international human rights in order to generate some considerations for future work. It is submitted that the role and right of child participation reflects rhetoric rather than practice in relation to the historical priority of child protection in most development and humanitarian efforts concerning children.