The struggle for the rights of children is not just a matter of feeling sorry for the people of this country or that; it is a common interrogation. There is plenty of complicity—and we are not exempt. Satyarthi also has an economic mission that challenges the West. What does it mean to set up a factory in a country where children don’t go to school, or to buy clothes without looking at the labels? For that matter, in the United States, what does it mean when children are pulled into the criminal-justice system and not treated as children at all? Whose children are all children? The Peace Prize has often been broadly understood; children’s rights fits well into its mandate of increasing understanding between nations. It’s not only an abstract matter, though. War takes children out of school, whether they are refugees, as in Syria, or targets of attack, like the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. Children who have no other options are also likelier recruits for war. The economic exploitation of children is also raw abuse, backed up by coercion and often violence. (Satyarthi, in a speech, described a factory where “if they tried to run away, they were hanged upside down on trees and beaten with stones…. Many of them had been burned with cigarettes.”) School is a rebuke to war; so is caring about the futures of other people’s children.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 06:39:58 +0000
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