Although a challenging task, listening to children is a legal obligation. The principle of children’s right to participate is enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. At the start of the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, the onus is on all of the convention’s signatories to develop mechanisms for children to express their views and to influence decision-making that affects them and to achieve change.
The right to be heard is one of the four general principles of the convention – the others are the right to non-discrimination, the right to life and development, and the primary consideration of the child’s best interests. All children have this right, without discrimination, and it cuts across all different spheres of children’s lives – home, work, community, school, and local and national government as well as from local to global levels. Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals further emphasises the role of inclusion, participation, rights and security in sustainable development, with target 16.7 providing for “responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels”.
Meaningful participation by children requires space, opportunities, audience and influence. It also demands that children are safe, participate willingly and voluntarily, and are well informed throughout inclusive participatory processes. All too often efforts to include children in discussions about issues that affect them are tokenistic. They rarely manage to include the most vulnerable children, such as those who are involved in the ‘worst forms of child labour’, which include trafficking of children, debt bondage, serfdom, and children in armed conflict. These children are often hard to reach and their voices are rarely heard in policymaking. But going the extra mile is vital because listening to these children talking about their experiences of work and developing their own solutions can have an enormous impact on them as well as on the design and implementation of effective law and policy.
