An interview with Salvador Santino Regilme about his edited collection, Children's Rights in Crisis
Our member, Dr. Salvador Santino Regilme (Leiden University, the Netherlands), talk about his edited collection, Children's Rights in crisis: Multidisciplinary, Transnational, and Comparative Perspectives (Manchester University Press, 2024).
Q: What is this edited collection about?
Children’s Rights in Crisis brings together multidisciplinary and transnational perspectives on the systemic challenges facing the rights and dignity of children today. Drawing on legal, political, sociological, and education‑policy research, the volume examines how enduring and emerging crises—armed conflict, forced migration, pandemic disruption, gender inequality, and socio‑economic marginalization—undermine children’s well‑being across diverse world regions.
Through nine empirically rich and theoretically oriented chapters, the book interrogates how global norms (especially the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) interact with local political, cultural, and economic contexts to produce crises of protection or neglect. Contributors analyze issues such as corporal punishment in schools; the impact of COVID‑19 on child welfare; forced family separations at borders; child recruitment in armed groups; attacks on education; access to comprehensive sexuality education; transitions to adulthood and child marriage; and child trafficking in West Africa.
Moving beyond law‑centric accounts, this anthology emphasizes the interplay of domestic and transnational drivers of harm and highlights opportunities for policy reform, advocacy, and accountability to uphold children’s inherent dignity. Thankfully, the book is also available in digital format, open-access.
Q: What made you initiate this volume?
I observed that, despite the universal ratification of the CRC, children’s rights remain under‑examined in mainstream social‑science scholarship and deeply contested in practice. European scholars often approach the CRC from a legal standpoint, while social scientists addressing children’s welfare work in disciplinary silos.
The COVID‑19 pandemic and rising geopolitical tensions exposed how crises—public health emergencies, armed conflicts, migration policies—disproportionately impact children, yet receive fragmented academic attention. I felt a pressing need for a multidisciplinary platform that would bridge theoretical and empirical gaps, bringing together diverse voices to reflect on understudied policy areas and world regions.
By commissioning contributions from experts across law, political science, education, international relations, sociology, and human rights advocacy, I aimed to generate a holistic analysis of why, three decades after the CRC’s adoption, systemic abuses of children’s rights persist and how advocates might better safeguard children’s well‑being.
An excerpt from the introductory chapter:
The list of contemporary challenges facing children’s rights is long, and the challenges mentioned earlier are just a few. In September 2022, the UN Child Rights Committee (UN CRC) published its findings concerning the plight of children’s rights in several countries (UN Human Rights Office 2022). In the report, the UN CRC highlighted the wide variety of abuse against children across many different countries: pervasive sexual exploitation and online violence in Germany; non-Kuwaiti children who are systemically discriminated against in access to fundamental social services and are often targets of hate speech in Kuwait; alarming acts of violence committed against children in conflict zones in the Philippines (especially on the southern island of Mindanao) through conscription in armed conflict, sexual abuse, imprisonment, and violent attacks on educational institutions and medical facilities.
Despite these challenges to children’s dignity, their rights have been formally and universally recognized by the international community. In 1989, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and introduced the document for signature to member states (LeBlanc 1991; Schaaf 1992; Vandenhole 2022). In September 1990, the CRC was ratified, and as of 2021, 196 states (or all members of the UN) formally recognized and signed it, except the United States. Since then, many global governance institutions, domestic state institutions, civil society activists, and other corporate organizations have invoked the importance of human rights and the dignity of children—or human individuals aged eighteen years and below—in various policy actions, government strategies, organizational missions, diplomacy, and public advocacy (Regilme 2021, 2022a, 2022b). It has become increasingly clear, however, that the degree to which children’s rights are effectively observed and respected in global governance and national government strategies varies greatly within and between countries, as well as in policy issue areas. In public international law, the CRC’s main addressees are states, yet the global and transnational dimensions that facilitate local problems fundamentally challenge not only the state’s formal mandate, but also their capacities. For that reason, policy challenges concerning the rights and dignity of children should not be understood as mere outcomes and causes of domestic governance failures, but also as shortcomings of global governance, if not the normative structure of the contemporary global order. Often, contemporary policy problems within countries are produced through the complex interactions of local and global factors, as demonstrated by problems such as armed conflict and wars, labor rights abuses, poverty, extreme material inequality, human displacement from their natural habitat, and pandemics (Beck and Sznaider 2006; Regilme 2021, 2014).
Hence, this multidisciplinary and eclectic human rights anthology asks the following core questions: Considering that more than three decades have elapsed since the CRC was first introduced globally, how and under which conditions are the rights and dignity of children under siege or in crisis? Why have such crises emerged?