Over the past decade, EU and national policy-makers alike have paid more attention to childhood poverty and children’s rights. Whether this has led to better policies, and whether these policies have in turn resulted in less childhood poverty and more human dignity, remains debatable. A better understanding of both child poverty and children’s rights could help.
This book introduces several approaches in the field of child poverty and children’s rights studies, and identifies intersections between different theoretical approaches from both domains. This is a fruitful exercise for the academic disciplines involved, for policy-makers and for anyone taking an interest in these challenging subjects.
Children’s rights may provide some common ground for the different perspectives on the causes of poverty. They also introduce specific process requirements, in particular the participation of the poor. At the same time, children’s rights may gain from an encounter with child poverty studies, not least in grasping the complexity of child poverty and in making a realistic assessment of their own potential for addressing child poverty.
This book is a collaborative project of Centrum OASeS and the UNICEF Chair in Children’s Rights, both located at the University of Antwerp. The UNICEF Chair in Children’s Rights is a joint initiative of UNICEF Belgium and the University of Antwerp, Faculty of Law. The Chair was established in 2007. It acts as a knowledge broker of children’s rights within the academic community and between the academic community and policy and practice, through teaching, research and service to the community.