Abstract
Jonathan Todres and Sarah Higinbotham’s book, Human Rights in Children’s Literature, sets out to demonstrate the centrality of children’s literature in building a human rights culture in which children’s rights are widely known. Part advocacy, part analysis, this book uses a wide-ranging survey of children’s literary texts from the English-speaking West to illuminate how human rights narratives are embedded within them. In doing so, the authors aim to demonstrate how the texts themselves can and should be seen to function as a pedagogical tool through which human rights norms can be ‘disseminated and absorbed’ by children and adults alike (p. 17). The authors attempt to marry together explanations of children’s rights law with literary analysis, children’s own interpretations of stories, and explorations of historical and empirical studies of human rights and rights education research in order to argue for both the importance of children’s rights and the position of literature as a means to transmit understandings of rights to children. While it provides an engaging review of human rights themes in children’s literature, the book tends to overreach in its claims to demonstrate how human rights are taken up by children and adults through reading children’s literature, a practice that is not fully investigated through this frame of analysis.
The book begins by situating both the presence of human rights discourses within literature, and the importance of reading practices for children in terms of shaping how they see themselves and the world. ‘The stories that children read’, they suggest, ‘help children to construct social expectations – their sense of what is ethical conduct with others – and frame an understanding of their own specific rights and responsibilities’ (p. 11). The opening chapter then positions children’s literature as a means through which human rights education can be achieved in children’s imaginative engagements with stories.
Each chapter that follows is devoted to a different thematic suite of rights, which is explicated within the opening paragraphs of the chapter. These themes include participation rights; the right to be free from discrimination; identity and family rights; civil and political rights; economic, social and cultural rights, and finally, the role of the adult in upholding or violating children’s rights and the principle of best interests of the child. This is followed in each chapter by a review of how the particular right can be seen to be embedded (or repudiated) within texts of children’s literature. Existing historical and empirical studies are woven into the literary analysis to advocate for the importance of these rights in the lives of real children, the implications for children’s health and wellbeing in ignoring these rights, and strategies that have been used or found useful in embedding or teaching rights. Each of these chapters concludes by advocating again for children’s literature to be positioned among these strategies for inculcating rights in children’s worldviews.
The first of these, Chapter 2, examines the principle of participation framed in terms of children’s involvement in all matters concerning the child (explicated through a delightful illustration of Mack the very small turtle in Dr Seuss’ Yertle the Turtle) and the notion of listening to children, wherein a number of children’s texts in which children are both heard and ignored are presented. The chapter then engages in a discussion of participation rights, their positive effects on child development and the benefits of their inclusion in a range of spheres of public life, such as education, healthcare and the justice system. The chapter concludes, through a brief examination of a rewriting of Peter Rabbit, with a call for a shift in how adults perceive children. While this approach is useful in raising awareness, there would be considerable value in the authors’ extending their writing to include a discussion of how this may be achieved in practice.
Chapter 3 takes on the theme of discrimination and the pursuit of equality, and examines the ways in which children’s books confront and embed discrimination on the basis of race and ethnicity, sex, disability and age. It explores texts as diverse as the original comic book of X-Men and its representation of both disability and gender inequality, to Harper Lee’s advocacy for anti-discrimination in To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as Dr Seuss’ The Sneetches and Roald Dahl’s Matilda.
Chapter 4 groups together identity and family rights, arguing for the right of children to develop their own personality – as dictated both by their right to a name, nationality and to be known and cared for by their family – as well as the more general human right to ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’. Interestingly, many of the narratives examined in this chapter centre around individuality and characters who resist dominant discourses of identity politics, such as the repudiation of hegemonic masculinity in Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand, the bull who wouldn’t fight, or the challenging of traditional gender roles within families in Eric Carle’s Mister Seahorse, in which fish fathers are responsible for caring for their families. This chapter diverges from the structure of the previous chapters by engaging in a detailed study of children’s perceptions of The Story of Ferdinand. In doing so, it not only illuminates the nuanced and varied responses of children, it also provides a metatextual commentary on the importance of listening to children’s voices.
Chapter 5 examines the civil and political rights of children, including themes of juvenile justice, punishment, dignity, restorative justice, accountability and discipline through an examination of texts as diverse as Curious George and Harry Potter.
Chapter 6 turns to the economic, social and cultural rights of the child, including the rights to health and education, play, shelter and the power of collective action. Here, the authors also explore the impact of literature on social reform surrounding children’s economic exploitation: they detail the ways in which the practice of reading led to intervention in child labour in Victorian England, arguing that through the reading of The Water-Babies, the middleclass learnt empathy for child workers and advocated for their rights.
Chapter 7 looks at the role of adults in violating children’s rights and in the need to protect children’s rights, arguing that it is difficult to understand the lives of children without considering adults’ influence. In addition to framing these portrayals of adults as ways in which children can come to terms with the various roles of adults in their own lives, the authors also briefly examine how adult readers may be exposed to possible perceptions children have of adults through their engagements with children’s stories.
The final chapter of the book examines what the authors see as the guiding principle of children’s rights law: the best interests of the child. In conclusion, they make an argument again for literature as an instructive or pedagogical tool for the dissemination of human rights cultures.
While the analysis of children’s books in terms of human rights discourse and their presence within narratives for children is both interesting and fairly detailed – given the numerous texts surveyed – the book’s opening claims to the universality of both rights and the literature examined, its uncritical engagement with rights discourses and the child subjectivities these may assume, and its eliding of the readings emerging from literary analysis with children’s taking up of and interpolation of rights discourses, may be troubling to some readers. The authors identify some of these limitations in their discussion of scope, however it is difficult to see how a text in this area can discount the need to address such issues.
Although the authors’ book selection is based on what they identify as widely read and widely enjoyed children’s books, the children’s texts examined within the book emerge primarily from an English-speaking, Western-centric context. Telling here is the authors situating of the goal of human rights ethics as a ‘positive goal in teaching our children’ (my emphasis), illuminating an imagined community of readers who share a common understanding both of rights, childhood and indeed culture. Yet, the study concludes with a claim for the importance of ‘support[ing] children’s engagement with the literary world by making more widely available books in children’s native languages and books that reflect the breadth of children’s experiences and the diversity of value and culture globally’ (p. 207), an assertion that is undermined by the book’s engagement with human rights and children’s literature from a position that assumes the context-free universalism of both. Such a position has been unpacked within postcolonial literary studies and critiques of the universalism of childhood in the field/s, but this goes largely unnoticed in the book.
The book’s frequent reference to Dr Seuss’s line, ‘a person’s a person no matter how small’ draws attention to the text’s positioning of children’s subjectivities within a traditional humanist and developmental framework. This framework assumes the centrality of the rational adult and positions the child as becomings/beings, thus overlooking the extensive work emerging from childhood studies on conceptualising childhoods and children’s subjectivities differently. While in itself it is unproblematic as a fairly conventional positioning of childhoods – particularly within rights frameworks – this becomes troubling when it extends to the author’s interpretation of children’s reading strategies from within a discourse of child development. In doing so, children’s age and consequent assumed ability, rather than their context, readerly engagement or discursive positioning, is taken as the reason for their various interpretations of the text.
Most problematic, perhaps, is the text’s underlying assumption of literature as a direct pedagogical tool for teaching particular knowledges. The notion of the ‘transmission of ideas of rights’ taking place through literature ignores children’s ability to engage on multiple levels and undertake multiple readings of texts that are context dependent, as well as harking back to the long-demolished notion of the centrality of a ‘correct’ or authoritative reading position of literary texts.
Thus, while the book sets itself up as one that works to understand how international human rights norms are disseminated and absorbed by adults and children, it does little beyond providing literary analysis to demonstrate how such norms are indeed picked up by either adults or children. This is, in a sense, a methodological issue in that the book tends to mash up reader response with adult literary analysis and conflate the two. This is once again underpinned by an assumption of a privileged or canonical reading position that will be generally shared by all readers, or can be seen as the ‘true’ or ‘only’ reading of a text. In making this assumption the authors do not acknowledge the depth of contemporary literary scholarship that engages with the contextual and discursive practices that shape the analysis and interpretation of texts.
The book itself provides an engaging review of the ways in which human rights themes and subjects emerge within popular children’s literature and the intersection of such themes with empirical realities faced by children across history and elucidated within human rights education. While the book perhaps overstretches in its claim to show how children and adults imagine and understand rights through literature, its most basic premise, that human rights themes can be read within children’s texts, is nicely examined. This book may be of interest to educators looking to engage with human rights education as well as scholars of human rights and literature.