Beyond the familiar challenges for children and young people’s participation rights: the potential of activism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last 30 years, remarkable efforts have been made to understand and support children and young people's participation rights outlined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Despite these efforts, challenges remain consistently the same, such as tokenism, lack of sustainability, and accountability. This article reviews the progress and challenges for children and young people's participation. It then considers the potential of activism as a relatively novel concept for the children's rights field. Drawing on activism literature more generally, and considering examples of child activism, the article explores the potential of identity politics and social movements to challenge adult power, growing on-line activism and tensions between best interests, protection and participation. The article concludes that activism recognises children as political actors and problem solvers. The article develops the idea of an ‘ecology of participation', which values respectful intergenerational relationships that develop ‘critical social capital' for child activism and multiple participation forms - ranging from the more conventional, to protest, to transformation. This more extended conceptualisation of children and young people’s participation builds on all the participation rights within the UNCRC, recognising them as minimum standards rather than final destinations, to create more expansive understandings and practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".