Make it right
To make things right and build the positive future that children and their families deserve we do need to understand the full scale of the challenges. But so too is it necessary to be able to see how things could be different, that how things are is a choice and that there is an alternative.
We need the energy of the collective and of voices who are invested in their communities. We need to make real what the alternatives are, get people excited and invested in what funding could be used for in their areas if they had access to the money being ploughed into super courts and surveillance.
Human rights gives us a strong framework for doing this and the tools to bring us together across different issues to demand a society where all can thrive.
Collective
To reclaim rights is to see the common thread which runs through different struggles and our connection with other groups which helps find allies, build our power and act in solidarity with each other.
Raising awareness of the rights at the heart of our own fights doesn’t just strengthen one cause, it also support others. We can weave these threads into a rope, something strong which helps us all.
Build power
The wealthy have power and the ear of politicians. It can be hard to be heard and even when we are causes are co-opted and participation used to silence.
Reclaiming rights means to aim for meaningful influence for children and their families, and to increase the power of communities. ‘Voice’ of the child must be given due weight, with children’s rights to protest, to be involved in developing public policy and shaping their education and their schools and to vote at 16 all necessary. Parents too must have the support of advocates and be involved in shaping services so that they help not punish children and families. We can push for activist research and an unrelenting focus on meaningful and significant change.
“Children and young people should be afforded concrete and genuine opportunities to take part in the design of any laws, policies and projects with an environmental impact.”
Dunja Mijatović,
Commissioner for Human Rights,
Council of Europe
Report on UK (2022)
“At the core of our work is the belief that, (i) young peoples’ views should be centred in all decisions around their education and, (ii) they are capable of conceptualising, defining and actioning meaningful change.”
States of Mind
Breaking the Silence
“…instead of embracing the notion of participation as a process in which people with lived experience get “a seat at the table”, activism potentially involves the option of parents building a completely new table”
Dr Yuval Saar-Heiman and Professor Anna Gupta
Beyond participation: Parent activism in child protection as a path to transformative change (2024)
“…basically participation and empowerment alone, pointless. But when they’re actually guided by, say, respect, solidarity and the shift in power, then they have meaning.”
Participant at Just Fair event
Who’s rights are they anyway?
The Community Researchers take on the PANEL principles
Together we are stronger
Instead of trying to make politicians hear reason we can instead focus on making our positions stronger. We can meet with potential allies, or reach out to those who are not aligned to help them understand how children and their families are being harmed in the name of safety.
“How can adults, allies, and institutions support young people to have voice and power? The PASS model brings together four ways for those of us who support young people to think about young voice, young power, and young efficacy in democracy….The model must also challenge us to shift the burden of change from young people onto adults and systems that oppress young people.”
Dr Benjamin Bowman
Young People’s Voice and Power in Democracy: Supporting Through Action (2024)
“When you meet lots of others who have that same shame then it becomes us and that us has power.”
Naomi Klein
Ash meets Naomi Klein, Novara Media (2023)
“The powerful lesson of the Robodebt and Post Office debacles is that the machine is only stopped by ordinary people coming together. In both cases, it was the self-organisation of people affected and their allies which threw the necessary spanner in the works…”
Create the alternative
Insist on having it all
Threats or emergencies are often used by those in power to justify unthinkable measures. We are often told that it is a choice – between privacy OR safety.
This ignores that privacy is a vital part of safety. Either / or does not cut it.
Anchoring ourselves in the framework of human rights helps to keep clear that the choice actually is one of whether to move towards or away from rights respecting approaches. Failing to respect people’s rights to be able to earn enough, or to have housing and food enough to feed their children leads towards further rights abuses. The human rights framework saves us from starting from ground zero each time a new threat arises.
Those offering us the ‘difficult choices’ about keeping children safe are almost the same as the ‘difficult choices’ over keeping us safe during lock-down.
“The price of this escape route is an unprecedented increase in digital surveillance…In normal times, the degree of monitoring and state intervention we are talking about here would be out of the question in liberal democracies. But these are not normal times, and the alternatives are even more unpalatable.”
Report by Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI)
Cited by BBC News: Coronavirus: State surveillance ‘a price worth paying’ (2020)
“We strongly believe that all users should be in control of their own data, and that we should never need to sacrifice consent for covid-19 safety.”
Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar, project lead on Safe Paths platform
MIT Technology Review: Contact Tracing Without Big Brother
“Rather than privacy being an inhibitor of public health (or vice versa), our eroded privacy stems from the same exploitative logics that undergird our inadequate capacity to fund and provide public health.”
Dr Jake Goldenfein and Assistant Professors Ben Green and Salomé Viljoen
Privacy Versus Health is a False Trade Off (2020)
Make space for dreaming up how it could /should /must be
“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”
Professor Ruja Benjamin
Viral Justice, How We Grow the World We Want (2022)
Rights give us a clear framing and space for what is needed
Human rights not only have legal weight, they also give us strong moral ground, a framing for what is fair and right. And we need this. With the majority of media outlets in England owned by the uber wealthy and with the increasing influence of corporations and money in our political system there has been a shift in the Overton window – of what we are told is normal and acceptable – to the extent of us tolerating levels of inequality and poverty including children being diagnosed with ‘Victorian diseases’ such as rickets and scurvy.
We need a significant shift and the fact that our government agreed to everything included in these agreements can reassure us that these are reasonable expectations to have. They remind us – even as we fight for children to not go hungry – not to limit our expectations and our dreams. That children have a right to play as well as to safety. To recognise that protest and the right to strike and collective action are not wild and radical ideas but instead are a vital part of a just and fair society.
“…we might see [Holding Our Own] as a seed library, full of ideas and practices that, carefully tended, might grow into ways of living differently.”
Gracie Bradley
Liberty: Holding Our Own (2023)
“Radical storytelling is a communal practice that relies on building and renewing relationships and accountability. It is a way of creating society built on trust rather than suspicion, and hope rather than fear.”
Maslaha
Liberty: Holding Our Own (2023)