Barbara Bennett Woodhouse is among the United States’ foremost experts on children’s rights. She joined the Emory University Law faculty in 2009 as the L.Q.C. Lamar Chair in Law. She also serves as the co-director of the Barton Child Law and Policy Clinic. Her scholarship and teaching focus on child law, child welfare, comparative and international family law and constitutional law. Her book Hidden in Plain Sight: The Tragedy of Children’s Rights from Ben Franklin to Lionel Tate published in 2008 tells the tragic untold story of children’s rights in America.

MJ: Thank you for taking the time to have this conversation. At present you are teaching at Emory Law School in Atlanta. How did you get involved in children’s rights issues? And how does the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the CRC, guide/influence your work here in the United States, even though the US has not ratified this treaty?

BBW: I became involved in children’s rights through being involved with and sharing the lives of children. Like all of us, I was a child myself. I grew up in circumstances that were unusual for many Americans but not for children in the rest of the world. My parents were musicians who had few material resources. For much of my childhood, we lived in a house my father and mother built with their own hands and we had no running water or electricity or central heating, but we had a very secure and loving family life. I entered law school at age 35, as a second career, when my youngest child started school full time. I had been a nursery school teacher, a mother, an adoptive parent, and a foster parent and I had been active in my community on issues of children’s education and quality of life. These experiences made me appreciate the importance of meeting children’s emotional and educational as well as their material needs.

In law school, I took part in the pioneering Columbia Child Advocacy Clinic and represented foster children in court proceedings. In those days – the early 1980s – advocates in the U.S. were pushing for increased recognition of the rights of children under the Constitution of the United States—including equal opportunity, to have a voice in courts of law, to be protected from discrimination and interference in their family lives. My first exposure to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) was not until after I became a professor of law. It was 1990 and I heard Cynthia Price Cohen speak at a conference of the International Society of Family Law. She had been deeply involved as a U.S. negotiator. I found the articulation of children’s rights in the CRC to be much richer and more complex than the models I had been used to using. The CRC recognizes an obligation on the part of States Parties to meet children’s needs for nurture and sustenance and education and to help parents in their role as parents and as guardians of their children’s rights. This is a much more positive vision of children’s rights and it has inspired my scholarship as well as my advocacy for children. Now, twenty years later, it grieves me to say that the U.S. still has not ratified the CRC but the impact of the CRC is being felt around the world. Many of us here in the U.S. have been hard at work educating the American people about the CRC and advocating for its ratification. In my book Hidden in Plain Sight: The Tragedy of Children’s Rights from Ben Franklin to Lionel Tate (Princeton 2008), I show that children’s rights are not antithetical to U.S. traditions but deeply rooted in our history. Pointing to children in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Labor Movement in the early to mid 1900s, I argue that American children have earned their place as holders of human rights. I hope my work will play a role in hastening the ratification of the CRC by the U.S. To the extent the U.S. refuses to join the rest of the world in accepting the CRC, we will become increasingly isolated and irrelevant.

MJ: One of my concerns is that children have the right to be heard and their views taken very seriously, in other words the right to participate. Article 12 in the CRC expresses this and it is such a misunderstood concept among parents, schools, politicians, policy shapers, law makers etc, etc. I remember several years ago, the NGO Committee on Children’s Rights here in New York convened a meeting for NGOs to talk about the concept of child participation, and one of the representatives of a major NGO actually walked out.

BBW: I am always shocked and disappointed at the lack of understanding shown by many adults towards the child’s right of participation. The saying that “children should be seen but not heard” is still alive and well when it comes to actually listening to what children have to say. But imagine depriving a whole class of people of one of the most fundamental of rights—the right to express one’s views in matters concerning one’s own welfare. We recognize that the stakeholders in any policy discussion have a right to participate. Why not children and young people?

At the 2002 United Nations Special Session on Children, we were able to see first-hand the benefits of children’s participation. As the leader of the delegation from a major U.S. NGO—the American Bar Association, I witnessed what it means to have youth present and speaking out. I will never forget the color and liveliness and energy of those several days in May. Hundreds of delegates below the age of 18 (the “U-18s”) came to New York City from nations around the world to meet with each other, to draw up a report to the General Assembly and to participate in the Special Session panels and discussions. They were so articulate and so well informed and it was a pleasure to see the intelligence and diversity of perspectives they brought to this discussion. Anyone who actually works with children and youth knows that they have a lot to say. Given appropriate structure and modes of expression, even very young children have something important to tell us. It takes some extra work and involves some risks, but let’s stop being afraid to listen and start learning from youth. I love this quotation from an organization that encourages children’s participation: “Social change does not come easy, and involving young people does not make it easier. But it does make it better.”

MJ: In one of your writings you mention that “Child Rights” is the 3rd revolution after 1) changes in Work/Family structures, i.e. women’s movement, and 2) the scientific revolution regarding child development and the impact of genetics and environment.

This 3rd revolution made me think of a fairly recent different concept regarding Human Rights implementation. We used to talk almost exclusively about Human Rights Education and now I hear more and more ‘Human Rights Learning.”

BBW: The new focus on “Human Rights Learning” as opposed to “Human Rights Education” is consistent with a growing appreciation of the agency of all learners, not just children. At one time, we might have been excused for thinking of education as a process similar to filling a car’s tank with gas. Teachers pumped “education” into the passive and empty student and then sent the student onto the road of life with a nice full tank. But we now appreciate the active role that the learner plays in the process and we see how learning actually changes the architecture of the brain. We learn and grow by interacting with and by engaging with ideas. This is true of children as well as older learners. In the University world, we are beginning to talk about “Engaged Learning” as the ideal. Instead of “teaching” facts, we create contexts and situations in which learning is an active and interactive process that leads to full integration of ideas into the brain and the soul of the learner. Children, who are the most voracious and accomplished of learners (think how much a child learns between birth and age three), should be our role models for engaged learning. Children can teach us a great deal about human rights that we might not have known or appreciated without their voices and perspectives.

MJ: Thank you so much for all the work you do on behalf of children.

Margaretha Jones is the Co-Chair of the CoNGO Committee on Children’s Rights in New York representing the IHEU.