Reclaim: Rights for Children
“Something amazing about rights and children”
Rights protect children. Their lives, their well-being. Their freedom, the space to develop ideas and grow as people, the democracy and society they live in, their family, standards of living, their agency and autonomy, their education, their safety, the freedom to make mistakes, to make their own decisions, to play.
Children’s rights in England are being undermined, chipped away at and disregarded. This is impacting children in deeply negative ways.
1. The UK government are ignoring legally binding international human rights obligations they agreed to honour, including social and economic rights and duties to support families.
And children are paying the price.
Despite being the fifth richest country in the world high numbers of children and families in England are in crisis. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child is the latest to condemn the government’s appalling record in a damning report.
Ten years of cuts to services, support and provision, the decimation of community resources and in the face of a so-called ‘cost of living crisis’ the difficulties are mounting up. There are increasing numbers of families living in inadequate housing with problems such as damp and black mould, or who are homeless. Families who are having to go without basics including food and heating.
The problems seem endless and across all areas. There is crisis in the lack of help and support available for children who have special educational needs and disabilities. Rising numbers of children are struggling within the school system, resulting in exclusion, inability to attend and off-rolling. Support services for those having a hard time with drugs or alcohol have been cut, leading to escalating problems. NHS waiting times are the longest they have ever been since records began. Over half the women seeking refuge from domestic violence were rejected in 2019. In work poverty is very high, 75% of children living in poverty have a parent in work.
In all of these instances it is a failure of government to respect rights, particularly those of children.
The UK government have a legal duty to support families under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and to provide social and economic rights as committed to under both the Europe Social Charter – ratified by the UK in 1962 – and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights – ratified by the UK in 1976.
“The high number of children living in, or at risk of, poverty is a serious human rights problem affecting every other aspect of their safety and well-being.“
Dunja Mijatović, Commissioner for Human Rights
2. While everyone’s rights are at risk children face an additional threat with removal of rights being justified on the basis it ‘keeps children safe’.
It doesn’t. Rights protect children.
‘Safeguarding’ is used to justify a number of measures which are not compatible with children’s rights. The strip searching of ten-year old children by police. The surveillance and intrusion into Muslim children’s lives under PREVENT. Parents are financially sanctioned and even risk prison when children can’t attend school.
More widely the government has claimed that to keep children safe they need to track them, know where they are, that an identifier number is needed to do so – essentially national ID for children. They are also pushing for measures which do not respect children’s right to privacy. Shockingly this expressly includes the desire that councils be able to store special category data – information which needs special protection because it is sensitive – even when not in their “best interests”.
Children’s right to privacy is also under threat from the latest government guidance on safeguarding, Working Together to Keep Children Safe 2023, which tells practitioners to share their information without consent at an unjustifiably early point. And the government’s Data Protection and Digital Information (no 2) bill also removes vital rights protections for the sharing of children’s information. There can be significant and lifelong negative impacts of personal data being shared without good reason.
Children’s rights are also being lost in the child protection process. A large body of evidence has long shown investigations to be intrusive and traumatising. Now – as a result of a toxic cocktail of government policy, of austerity, the culture of blame of both of parents and of social workers, and the removal of human rights from guidance –much higher numbers of families being put through this process. This includes parents not suspected of any abuse, such as parents of disabled children who have asked for help.
Even after going through this process there is little help available. Since the government allowed corporations to profit from children’s homes council’s budgets are being eaten up by sky high bills. Increasingly there isn’t the support to keep children safely at home with their families, children are being removed at the highest rate since the 1980s. After being removed they are often separated from siblings and wider family, even being moved across the country away from friends and school.
Children’s rights – to privacy, to family life, to support for their family, to enjoy the company of their family, to support for their family – must be respected. Rights for children must be protected, not stripped away in the name of ‘safeguarding’.
The Victoria Climbié Foundation UK
Professor Eileen Munro
No More Exclusions
3. New technologies are putting children at risk, especially with the government’s stated focus on the needs of markets.
The best interests of children have got to come before profit.
“It was appalling, it was all about growth and innovation and nothing about human rights.”
MP Kwasi Kwatang
Innovation Strategy 2021
Government strategies detail their desire to be a market leader in new technologies, such as machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI), drones, biometrics. They outline their aim to develop the “most pro-innovation regulatory environment in the world” and aim to be an “AI superpower within ten years” The public sector is expected to lead on use of these new technologies.
This is dangerous for children and their families. Evidence shows that however much data is used, machine learning cannot predict risk in human lives and that children and families are harmed by their use. Despite this these systems have been rolled out and the government are pushing all councils to use these expensive yet ineffective systems. Even catastrophic failures on the international stage have not dimmed their enthusiasm for this dangerous misuse of technology. The Dutch government was brought down by their use of a self-learning algorithm that led to tens of thousands of families being pushed into poverty, suicides and a thousand children being put into care.
With each new technology our rights are losing out. Facial recognition combined with the ability to link much greater amounts of data means that the massive network of CCTV cameras in the UK becomes more of an issue. Yet despite serious concerns as to high numbers of false positives and privacy concerns police minister Chris Phips is pushing for all police forces in the UK to adopt it.
In England police forces have used biometric mobile fingerprint scanners in a way which disproportionately impacts those of Arabic appearance and Black and Asian people. In sharp contrast Welsh and Scottish police have said that legal, procedural and ethical concerns means they won’t use the technology.
Children before corporations. Rights considerations and protections – especially those of children – must be central to any strategy on new technology. Machine learning / AI and algorithmic systems must not be used for predictive child protection or for similar uses in the welfare system.
4. Measures are being rolled out without public understanding or consent. Yet when we do understand we care a lot.
Public awareness of how the government use data and algorithms to make decisions about our lives is low. A government project by the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) – showed that while initially it was not a “front-of-mind topic” this changed dramatically once people actually understood what the government does. Even for lower risk uses of algorithms participants felt that detailed information about usage must be available. For higher risk uses participants also wanted active upfront communication to “notify people that the algorithm is being used and to what end”, including targeted and personal information for those likely to be impacted.
In reality there is no transparency from government. For example, the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People (GMCDP) believe that an algorithm used by the Department for Work and Pensions is flagging up disabled people for its benefit fraud investigations. The government refuses to answer their questions, saying that divulging any details would “compromise the effectiveness of the system” so they are having to make a legal challenge to get answers.
Children and their families must not lose their right to consent – or not – to their data being stored and shared. This must include an understanding of how it is used and the possible impact of this on their lives.
“Once participants were introduced to specific examples of potential public sector algorithms, they felt strongly that transparency information should be made available to the public, both citizens and experts.”
Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation
(Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
Making the world we need.
Reclaim Rights for Children brings together expertise and evidence – from academics, practitioners and those with lived experience – around key issues.
Rights for children – or the absence of them – is the common thread through our shared struggles spanning areas of child protection, human rights, civil liberties, data protection, computing, SEND and education. We recognise that issues are intersectional and some groups are impacted more greatly than others, particularly Muslim, Gypsy and Traveller, and Black and Asian families as well as disabled children and parents. We bring our own perspectives and solutions and will not agree on every issue but we are all committed to protecting rights for children.
We demand that the UK government respect the human rights frameworks they agreed to. We will hold the government to account on their failures and remind them of their obligations to respect rights for children which need to be incorporated into the UK and English legal system. We know that this is achievable. Scotland is creating a road map in this which we support them in and that we can follow.
We reject the shame and separation involved when individuals and communities are blamed for the failures of government and for the hugely difficult situations they are placed in. Profiling children and families involves not only stereotyping but also labelling children in a ‘lowest-common-denominator’ way and treating them accordingly which we know limits their futures. Instead we need approaches and systems which support children to be the best they can be, to help them dream big and which provide the scaffolding to help them achieve whatever they want.
Children, their families and their communities are best placed to say what they need and what the solutions to their problems might be. We reject profit motives or the assumption that technology is the answer to everything. We uphold the importance of rights focused solutions which strengthen families and communities, enabling them to be a protective, nourishing resource for children and for each other.
We will make space for the positive and inspiring and to questions of what we want as well as calling out the injustices. We will highlight positive practice, beautiful ways forward and pose the big questions that ask people to imagine…what if?
What if instead of multi-million-pound courtrooms we funded youth projects? What if instead of systems which police people we provided support? What could that look like for me and my community? What if the government were willing to support the moonshot of all children growing up in a rights respecting country? What might that look like?
What if….
“We know that no single group, organisation or community holds all the answers. Instead, it’s by recognising our shared struggles and connecting our diverse wisdom that we can produce real solutions to the challenges our communities face.”
Liberty and others
Holding Our Own: A guide to non-policing solutions to serious youth violence