Human Rights in Children's Literature

How can children grow to realize their inherent rights and respect the rights of others? In this book, authors Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham explore this question through both human rights law and children's literature. Both international and domestic law affirm that children have rights, but how are these norms disseminated so that they make a difference in children's lives? Human rights education research demonstrates that when children learn about humanrights, they exhibit greater self-esteem and respect the rights of others. The Convention on the Rights of the Child—the most widely-ratified human rights treaty—not only ensures that children have rights, it also requires that states make those rights "widely known, by appropriate and active means,to adults and children alike." This first-of-its-kind requirement for a human rights treaty indicates that if rights are to be meaningful to the lives of children, then government and civil society must engage with those rights in ways that are relevant to children. Human Rights in Children's Literature investigates children's rights under international law - identity and family rights, the right to be heard, the right to be free from discrimination, and other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights - and considers the way in which those rights are embedded in children's literature from Peter Rabbit to Horton Hears a Who! to Harry Potter. This book traverses children's rights law, literary theory, andhuman rights education to argue that in order for children to fully realize their human rights, they first have to imagine and understand them.

One of its strengths is that it does not merely depend on adults' analyses of key works of children's literature, but it also incorporates responses from child readers themselves. As the authors explain, they 'designed a qualitative, descriptive study' that involved their facilitation of reading groups comprised of 'children as young as four years old and as old as seventeen in their natural settings (schools and after-school programs)'; in turn, they drew on the participants' insights, anecdotes and questions as they considered how 'children's books allow children to think about human rights in ways that are developmentally suitable and profoundly imaginative'. s, The authors analyze and discuss children's books that exemplify the rights and ideas covered within that area of international law, as well as reader responses from children engaged with those same fictional texts. The result is a book that is complex, informative, and multifaceted... The selected results of this qualitative study help bolster the authors' claims that children's literature can and does affect the perception of human rights among young readers while supporting the idea that the study of children's literature is valid and important in this context., For those working to bring human rights home, the book offers important and unique insights on the role that childrens literature can play in shaping a culture of human rights, near and far., The authors have embarked upon a unique and thought-provoking exploration of childrens literature through which readers gain new insights into how stories influence childrens awareness of their rights. This groundbreaking inquiry is a must read for all those interested in learning how literature serves as a vehicle for human rights education., Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham reveal in this remarkable and long overdue book [that] the content of children's literature is crucial. It matters for the children concerned and, by extension, for the very nature of the societies in which they grow up. It helps children to understand that they have rights, and that these rights are important. Children's literature has a pivotal role to play in forging that early sense of self-worth, and Jonathan and Sarah are to be congratulated for shining a new light on a role that has, until now, been under-appreciated". (From the Foreword) -Carol Bellamy, Former Executive Director of UNICEF

Jonathan Todres is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law. His research focuses on children's rights and child well-being. Professor Todres has published more than fifty articles on children's rights, child trafficking and related forms of exploitation, legal and cultural constructs of childhood, and human rights in children's literature. He is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.Sarah Higinbotham is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her scholarship centers on the intersections of literature and law. She has written about the violence of the law in early modern England, critical prison theory, and human rights in children's literature. She teaches at a men's prison outside Atlanta and works actively with an Atlanta nonprofit that benefits children who have an incarceratedparent.