Suffer the Children

In 1973 Hillary Rodham Clinton famously stated that children's rights is a slogan in search of a definition used to bolster various arguments for peace and for specific rights but without any coherent conception of children as political beings. In 1989 the United Nations established the<br>basis for this definition in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) a document every nation in the world save the United States has ratified. Still human rights theorists scholars and jurists continue to disagree as to the theoretical justification for children's human rights. <p/>In <em>Suffer the Children</em> Richard P. Hiskes establishes the first substantive theoretical foundation for the human rights of children. As Hiskes argues recognizing the rights of children fundamentally alters the meaning and usefulness of human rights in a global context. Ironically the case for<br>children's rights as Hiskes argues should be seen as the evolution distillation or maturing of human rights in general. Children's human rights will end the debate about whether groups can have rights because globally many rights claims today are precisely group claims including those from<br>children. Moreover Hiskes provides a new critical assessment of the United Nations CRC and explores child activism for human rights worldwide--in courts on social networks and in public demonstrations--to show how children are already claiming their rights in ways that will fundamentally change<br>the meaning both of rights themselves and of democratic processes. Giving children rights in a way that avoids privileging any single cultural experience of children would make rights no longer a Western individualistic idea but a truly global one.<br>