It’s an age-old truth that the health of a society is best measured by how it treats its children. Nothing else provides so accurate an indicator. Not the gross national product; not the S & P 500; not the index of consumer expectations. When a society treats its children well this implies that the future is recognized, taken into account, and accorded special care.
“How will this decision affect our children?”—a question that implies the correct answer to many, if not most, questions of law, policy, and legislation.
Article 29 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child speaks to this in the following terms: “States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to: (a) The development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential.” And Article 77(1) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention provides: “Children shall be the object of special respect.”
Were one to draft a New Bill of Rights for Children, one might recognize even greater, more forward-thinking rights and responsibilities. An absolute right to safety and protection? An absolute right to a clean and healthy environment? An absolute right to be free of physical or emotional abuse of any kind? An absolute right to an optimal degree of education, training, guidance, provision, and health care? An absolute right to an optimal level of financial and economic security?
The law typically does not recognize a duty to rescue, but with children it should. Society should be bound to carry out such duties as “the duty to take preemptive steps to prevent harm” as well as the “the duty to intercede and intervene.” Were such duties legally recognized cases such as DeShaney vs. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 (1989) would immediately be singled out as having been wrongly decided.[1]
As phrased by Nelson Mandela: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Eventually such rights and responsibilities will come to be legally recognized—it’s only a matter of time. Why? Because children, at birth and without their consent, become at once the most vulnerable group within a society which they had no role in creating; because the lifeblood of any society is its children; and because it’s a law of nature that those least capable of protecting themselves are entitled to be kept safe by those most capable of providing such protection.
[1] See, e.g. Laura Oren, The State’s Failure to Protect Children and Substantive Due Process: DeShaney in Context, 68 North Carolina Law Rev. 659, 713 (1990)(“The state’s constitutional duty to protect Joshua , therefore, arose from more than the special relationship that it had with him. It also derived from the state’s affirmative use of power that imposed a special legal status on him, increased his isolation and vulnerability to abuse by his father, and left him only one avenue of protection…”)
