Alex Proimos/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc)
In June 2012, I sat in a circle with 25 children and teenagers, listening to them present detailed critical analyses of Peru’s Law on Children and Adolescents (Código de los Niños y Adolescentes, from here on out simply ‘código’). Small groups of kids had spent the past several hours comparing the current law to a set of proposed changes, identifying potentially positive changes and listing their various concerns about both the old and new laws. Most of these kids were working children involved in organisations of child and adolescent workers. They had come together for a workshop to kickoff an advocacy campaign that would argue for their own set of changes to the código.
During this workshop they discussed the potential implications of the policy changes, as well as the assumptions about childhood embedded in both the original and new versions of the law. The old policy, while it had problems, was fundamentally rooted in the idea of children as subjects of rights. The proposed new policy, however, seemed to revert to older views of children primarily as passive objects of protection and/or correction.
