This book is the first to comprehensively develop the concept of childism to understand, study and analyse age-based discrimination against children.

It presents a critical theory to help comprehend intersecting prejudice against children and to examine the weak implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and in what ways violations against children can be analysed through the intersections of racist, sexist and ableist discrimination. The book further offers scholars a new perspective when studying structural forms of discrimination and oppression against children and provides professionals with a new vocabulary on prejudice targeting children when assessing theory, policy and praxis on ‘child-friendly’ and ‘child-centred’ initiatives that overlook the need to protect children against discrimination.

This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of human rights, child and youth studies, education, prejudice studies, the United Nations and child law, and more broadly to sociology, social policy, psychology, and social work.

Epistemic injustice in human rights education can be found in a colonial historical trajectory of human rights that rests on accounts of western agency only. Such narratives overshadow the legacy of Indian and Pakistani freedom fighters and Latin American feminists who negotiated human rights against colonial, patriarchal and racist discourses after the Second World War. Without their contribution a United Nations rights concept risked being limited to a western trajectory of the ‘Rights of Man’ that represents a monistic universalism. This chapter revisits the history of the United Nations, unearthing historical counternarratives of what a pluralistic universalism of human rights means by adding knowledge about postcolonial feminist subjects who spoke of a positive conception that could reduce injustice.

This book is the first to comprehensively develop the concept of childism to understand, study, and analyze age-based discrimination against children. It presents a critical theory to help comprehend intersecting prejudice against children and to examine the weak implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and in what ways violations against children can be analyzed through the intersections of racist, sexist, and ableist discrimination. The book further offers scholars a new perspective when studying structural forms of discrimination and oppression against children and provides professionals with a new vocabulary on prejudice targeting children when assessing theory, policy, and praxis on ‘child-friendly’ and ‘child-centered’ initiatives that overlook the need to protect children against discrimination. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of human rights, child and youth studies, education, prejudice studies, the United Nations and child law, and more broadly to sociology, social policy, psychology, and social work.

In this paper we conduct a poststructural discourse analysis inspired by Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WRP) approach. We explore what kinds of problems are formulated in preschool educational policy on multilingualism, and what underlying assumptions underlie the dominant discourse on language proficiency in Sweden. Serving as a case to discuss how racism, ableism and childism intersect with linguicism, we examine the importance of shifting from a ‘children’s (special) needs’ discourse to a ‘children’s (language) rights’ discourse through a social justice education framework.   We draw upon Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s understanding of childism, which refers to prejudice and discrimination against children based on beliefs about their inferiority to adults. The right to and rights in education are constituent upon linguistic rights, upon students learning to use their first language, whether that be minority, indigenous or sign language.

The concept of childism is, in this chapter, used primarily as a theoretical approach to analyse adult resistance against the realisation of children’s rights. Childism can help us to understand children’s exposure to negative prejudices, attitudes and discriminatory structures in society. This chapter argues, that in order to address discrimination against children on a systemic level, a critical approach in child rights studies on negative beliefs against children is needed to illuminate prejudice ingrained in the ways in which policies and laws are formulated on a structural level. By studying discourses that lead to abuse of children we may better understand underlying reasons to the challenges facing a respect for children’s rights internationally. Reasons and arguments given for why children are denied basic rights and freedoms can be systematically examined over time by addressing how adult’s prejudice about children lead to age-based discrimination against children. These intersectional understandings of subordination may inform affirmative policy needed for realising the rights of the child. The chapter calls for further empirical studies that interrelate violations of children’s rights with different overlapping forms of prejudice and discrimination against children.

How can human rights for children born outside their national jurisdiction with parents deemed as terrorists be safeguarded? In what ways do children risk being discriminated in their welfare rights in Sweden when treated as invisible part of a family? How can we do research on children’s rights in not just ethically sensitive ways but also with respect for children as rights subjects? And what could be a theory on social justice for children? These are questions discussed in studies from different disciplines concerning children’s international human rights, with a special focus on the realization of the CRC in Sweden.