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Listening to children

Extract from the Unicef publication - The State of the World's Children, 2003

"Sometimes I feel that the world wants me to grow up faster. I feel like people don't respect the things I say or what I have to give just because of may age."

Nikki Sanchez-Hood, 15, Canada

The journey from where we are today to a world where children's opinions are routinely sought cannot be made overnight. Like all intellectual journeys, it is a process that depends on acquiring new knowledge, increasing understanding and overcoming fear and resistance. And as the necessary intellectual work is being done and new understandings are being put into practice, new skills will be needed by all those involved - children and adults, families, communities, cities and organizations.

Because the family is the first place where children learn to participate, it is also the ideal forum where children can learn to express their views while respecting the perspectives of others. As the Committee on the Rights of the Child advised in one of its early sessions: "Traditionally, the child has been seen as a dependent invisible and passive family member. Only recently has he or she become 'seen' and.... the movement is growing to give him or her space to be heard and respected...

The family becomes in turn the ideal framework for the first stage of the democratic experience for each and all of its individual members, including children."

But the task facing parents and an extended family is not an easy one as they balance their responsibilities both to support a child's participation and to protect and guide the child. On a daily and often moment-to-moment basis, they put article 5 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child into practice in the process of assessing their child's 'evolving capacities' (although they usually don't use those terms to describe their decisions). Recognizing the critical and vital role of families, many organizations have developed programs and advocacy campaigns that support parents and families in their efforts. For example, UNICEF's Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean has developed a set of policy guidelines for working with adolescents that calls for public policies to strengthen families in a range of ways.

Just as parents have traditionally been assumed to know what is best for their sons and daughters, so agencies and authorities working on behalf of children have tended to do so without considering what the beneficiaries of 'their' projects have to say.

The results can be disastrous. In the United Kingdom for example, the 1980s and 1990s saw a string of public inquiries documenting systematic physical and sexual abuse by staff in children's homes, institutions set up to protect children from harm in their own families.

One of the key lessons of the inquiries was that this widespread abuse occurred because the children involved had no voice; when they complained, they were not believed and they became susceptible to further, punitive abuse.

The flipside of this coin is that when programmes and policies take children's perspectives into account from the outset, they can produce better results for everyone concerned. A case in Christchurch, New Zealand, illustrates this. The local authority proposed a 60-kilometre-per-hour speed limit at the point where a six-lane highway passed an elementary school and thought it had adequately consulted the local community. Christchurch is, however, an unusual city, having had its own Child.

The experience of PLAN in Indonesia has also been transformed by consulting children. The organization felt it had done a good job in the village of Padi: it had talked to the village committee about what was needed, had built a road latrines and had repaired the school building and the clinic. Community leaders professed themselves satisfied.

But doubts lingered as to whether the work had catered to the poorest of the poor who lived up the mountainside away from the roads and new water supply. So when it came to working with the nearby village of Kebonsari, they started differently - by consulting 150 school-age children and using a local group of artists.

The children insisted that PLAN should begin by working with the neediest children - those whose parents had migrated to find work or who had no land. They complained about being hit and beaten in the home and at school. They started a petition to improve a dangerous bridge and got the district head's promise to improve it. They wanted water pumps installed so that girls have more time to study instead of walking long distances to fetch water.

The lessons applied in Kebonsari - that there is added value when children are involved from the start - form the basis of PLAN programmes in Indonesia. In a culture that expects children to defer to their elders, children's groups are, moreover, now involved in rural libraries, small income-earning projects, editing their own magazines, child-to-child health programmes and waste management.

Consultation with children will not be easy in cultures and contexts where they are still widely expected to be seen but not heard. But, as in the case of PLAN's work in Indonesia, one key reason why the practise is gaining ground is that when children's needs are genuinely taken into account, the results tend to bring improvements for the community as a whole.

The safer streets and cleaner environments that children often demand, for example, not only benefit them but also the vast majority of adults as well. Consulting children as a group - on a regional, national or even international basis - can also be of immense service to policy makers and planners. In Bangladesh, the government ministry charged with developing a National Plan of Action against Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children began by consulting children who were affected, such as those involved in sex work, girls who were trafficked and those vulnerable to abuse.

The children's report implicated police, magistrates and other state officials in trafficking. Most of the children's recommendations were included in the National Plan of 2002 and a 'child task force' is being established as part of the monitoring and implementation of the Plan.

Collective attempts to gather, evaluate and analyze efforts in child participation are emerging in countries and regions around the world, and increasingly at the international level. One such forum is the Children as Partners Alliance (CAPA), a coalition of international and national NGOs working with children, who recently met with representatives of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Canadian Government, youth from young people's organizations and researchers.

CAPA's purposes are to learn from experiences in working in "partnership with young people throughout the world" and to create an accessible data-base of these experiences.

Among its objectives are to establish standards of practise for programming, research, policy dialogue and advocacy, to engage in high-level advocacy to realize children's right to participate in decisions affecting all aspects of their lives and to support the development of child-led organizations and of participatory research of children and young people.

These examples demonstrate not just that it is worth consulting children but also that a shift in thinking and approach is required from adults, to increase their capacity to listen to and understand children and adolescents and to include children and adolescents in 'serious' discussions.

A similar UNICEF-supported initiative has been meeting with success in the southern city of Bangalore in India. Here police and street children are brought together in training sessions that look at child rights and at how to cope with difficult cirmstances. So far, 1,700 officers have been trained and five police stations have been given a child-friendly award. "I try not to treat the child as a criminal," said one of the officers. "We have to understand what has brought the child into unlawful activities."

In El Salvador, the project of the Defensorias de Derechos Humanos de La Ninez y la Adolescencia, begun in 1995 by UNICEF and supported by Radda Barnen of Sweden and Save the Children UK, has taken as its objective the transformation of the 'no right' culture that pervaded family, interpersonal and institutional relations.

As part of the Defensorias, a Network of Young People met with the Minister of Education for the first time in the history of El Salvador and elaborated a proposal for public policies for children and youth, including revoking the policy that pregnant girls must leave school.

This proposal has been taken into account in the process of elaborating the National Policy on Children and Adolescents by the National Secretariat of the Family.

The Child-Friendly Cities initiative, an attempt by adults to create urban spaces that optimize child participation, is increasingly an idea whose time has come, with more local authorities and planners of the world's cities striving to implement child rights at the local level - where children live and can make a difference and to make urban environments healthier for children.

Around 1 billion children live in cities - close to half of all the children in the world - and at least 80 per cent of these live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In developing countries it is common for between a third and a half of the urban population to have incomes below the poverty line, many of whom are housed in illegally built settlements with limited access to safe water and adequate sanitation.

The Mayors as Defenders of Children initiative was launched in 1992 as a way of involving municipal leaders in the pursuit of child rights. The initiative recognized the fact that decentralization is transferring ever more responsibility for basic services to local governments all over the world.

This not only gives local authorities more power to make a difference in children's lives and environments, it also makes the participation and consultation of young people more feasible than it is at the national level.

This has become even more vital since the second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II)in 1996, which emphasized that the well-being of children is the ultimate indicator of a healthy society.

In Italy, the Ministry of the Environment coordinates the Child-Friendly Cities initiatives and some 200 cities had joined the movement by 2001. New ideas are shared in annual meetings and prizes are awarded to the cities that have performed best in various categories, such as child-centred urban planning for one example.

In the Philippines, the movement also has a national dimension through a goals-oriented programme that aims to promote child-rights principles at every level, from the family through the barangay (neighbourhood) to the city or region. Ukraine, meanwhile, has a strong 'mayors for child right' movement that in 2000 saw the mayors of 35 of the country's cities undertake to involve children in the planning, design, implementation and evaluation of policy affecting their health, development and protection.

In Kolkata, India, a citywide programme of action brings together major agencies committed to protecting and providing basic services for deprived urban children - including those who are working or homeless. As ambitious project survey has identified every child who is out of school. Because there are not enough schools for all these children, the city is creating 700 primary education centres, which will be managed by NGOs and run by young people specially trained as 'barefoot teachers'.

Even in places of conflict, such as the Occupied Palestinian Territory, there are examples of Child-Friendly Cities initiatives Fifteen Child Activity Centres have been set up to promote community participation implementing child rights. The Centres focus on young children, particularly girls and those in need of special protection, but adolescents are also involved and receive training so that they can assist the Centres' work.

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