Suffer the Little Children: How the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Has Not Supported Children

Abstract

This article demonstrates this theory with the use of five examples of problems that plague children around the globe. These five areas of concern will clearly demonstrate the duplicity of the CRC and its signatories, despite the rights extended to children, and are set forth in the sections of this article.

Section I discusses the growing child sex tourism industry and its prominence in many CRC signatory nations. It reveals that children are brutally sexually exploited in the face of their enumerated rights. [FN29] Section II discusses child marriage as the norm in many signatory nations, and demonstrates how a child's right to self-determination is subordinate to her culture and a marriage arranged for her. Section III reviews the well-known practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) of young girls as the norm in many signatory nations, clarifying the brutal reality that these children have no rights to challenge and object to the practice, even though it leaves them mutilated for life. Section IV then discusses child soldiering, warfare training, and combatant activity as an active and growing concern in many signatory nations. Its horrors reveal the desperate exploitation of children by state actors and opposing rebel fighters to recruit personnel for their armies. Finally, Section V explains the severe problem of forced labor and servitude of children around the world, revealing the utter inability of children to enforce their own rights against adults who insist on child bondage and exploitation for their own benefit.