America Again Bows Out of UN Rights of the Child Convention

In 1989, the United Nation's Rights of the Child Convention was drafted, and it was put into effect in 1990.  Although the United States, then under the Reagan Administration, was instrumental in drafting the articles in the treaty, America never signed it, along with only one other country to date--Somalia.

The intention of the treaty was to establish guidelines for basic children's rights.  The document acknowledges that children are often the victims of the most violent crimes, including rape, forced conscription, forced labor, and other forms physical and psychological abuse.  Essentially, the U.N. Rights of the Child Convention was created in order to give those under eighteen a voice and to offer protection for the one group of the world's citizens who are most vulnerable to suffering on a global scale.

Other U.N. member nations are perplexed at the United States' refusal over the past twenty years to sign the treaty.  A recent Voice of America article (“US Remains Hold-Out in UN Child Rights Convention”) reports on the nation's most recent hold out.  While President Barack Obama has called America's absence in the treaty "embarrassing," the Senate is the final decision maker.  As of yet, the convention has not been presented for ratification.

What, then, is holding us back?  For one, the United States has been historically reticent in signing any sort of international treaty.  Although the Rights of the Child treaty is seemingly benign, conservative elements across the country have decried the U.N. Convention as indicative of international power impinging on national sovereignty and parental rights.

Those supporting the ratification assert that the supposed power-grabbing of the treaty is a misconception clouded by ultra-conservative politicking.  The treaty, if anything, affirms parental rights and stresses the importance of children being raised and supported by their parents, even if they are separated.

While the United States did sign two additional protocols in which forced child conscription and prostitution were banned, the country has yet to move forward with any decision regarding the treaty.  Some in the global community have pointed out the good it would do for suffering children around the world--especially in third world countries--if the world's most powerful nation joined the convention.

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This guest post is contributed by Jessica Cortez, who writes on the topics of Online Degree Programs.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: cortez.jessi23@gmail.com.  

To My Father

Today is Father’s Day. And since it is Father’s Day I should say that, counter to what the mass media and the most extreme elements of radical feminism want to make us believe, people need fathers (and I say this with pride: people need us fathers).

Mine, don Vidal Guzmán Hernández, was a Puerto Rican peasant, or “jíbaro” as we say, who in his young years worked in agriculture, cutting sugar cane even, and when he became a man came to the United States, as many other Puerto Ricans peasants did in the 50s, to Gary Indiana, where he worked in the by then flourishing steel industry. There, as many other Puerto Ricans, ceased to be a “jíbaro” to become working class, a transformation or tragedy that marked the pathos of XX century Puerto Rican culture. My mother, a housewife (as was expected from Puerto Rican women of her time), used to tell me how he, man of the Tropics, arrived home exhausted and literally frozen, in such a way the she had to heat water to unfreeze him (“…Borinquen is pure flame and here the cold is killing me...” says the illustrious poem by Virgilio Dávila).

When he got used to the life in Indiana, he had to return to Puerto Rico to take care of his father, my grandfather Félix, whose health was deteriorating fast.

I remember his exhaustion. Since he returned to Puerto Rico until his premature death at 54, he was door-to-door fabric salesperson, dispatcher at gas stations, security guard, worker at the garbage trucks, in summary, everything he could be to sustain his family. When the moment required it, he had two full time jobs and went home to sleep.

I remember his tenacity. We Guzmans have the reputation, good or bad depending on how you see it, of dragging our hatred until the moment of our death and of being incapable of giving up. It is said that we never forgive and that we always have vengeance crouching deep inside. I learned with my father that what is said about our hatred, it can also be said about our love. I also learned that, at least my father was incapable of getting scared, much less surrender. My family has told me many stories that exemplify that quality of his character.

I remember, above all, his commitment to us, his family. He loved my mother since the day he fell in love with her until his death, and he adored us, his children.

And I also remember that when he died, people in my neighborhood attended his funeral as if it were of a high dignitary, and how they came to tell my brother and me what a great man he was, how honest and honorable he was.

Three decades alter his death, I still miss him and I, following the Puerto Rican tradition of asking for our elder’s blessing when we meet them, still go every morning to his picture and ask for his blessing.

If God grants me something, let that something be that I could be to my daughter the father that my father was to me.

What Do Children Want?

In his article titled “Australian Study Asks Children Their Ideas About Custody”, Robert Franklin, one of the regular collaborators of the Fathers & Families website, reviews a study done by Dr. Alan Campbell of the University of South Australia (Child Care in Practice, 7/1/08).

Dr. Campbell and his team interviewed a group of Australian children between the ages of 7 and 17, all of them children of divorced or separated parents. The study wanted to answer three basic questions:

1. What are children’s views on their ability to participate in decisions that directly affect them following their parents’ separation?

2. To what extent do children’s interview texts reflect an adequate understanding of children’s rights?

3. How do children construct their understanding of the concept of their ‘‘best interests’’ in relation to post-separation decision-making about their futures?

Campbell questions come from previous studies that show that courts tend to ignore children’s views on divorce, separation, and custody, a behavior that is based on the dubious idea that courts know better than children what is in their “best interests.”

The study proved that children not only have very specific views on these issues, but that they also wanted to express them. For example, most of the interviewed children wanted to have some input in the decisions that were being made about their lives, they believed that this was their right; as Franklin writes, “they wanted their voices to be heard.” When discussing the topic of the so-called “best interests of the child,” they stated that being consulted should be part of the concept. They believed that when courts ignore their voices, they are ignoring one of the main things that would guarantee their best interests.

The children were also concerned about the lack of fairness that prevailing custody arrangements represented for their parents and for them. They considered the practice of awarding primary custody to one parent unfair to both the non-custodial parent and them.

Children wanted fair custody arrangements and considered the common practice of primary custody/visitation unfair. They believed that only fair custody arrangements could satisfy the law’s requirement that the courts act in their best interests.

The interviewed children tended to consider that experts appointed by courts (social workers, psychologists, etc.,) interfere rather than serve the process, and that family members, including members of extended family, should be the ones making decisions about custody. Any input from outside the family was considered less legitimate than the advice and counsel of family members. Although this idea would be almost impossible to put into practice, it shows that children understand family as a complete unit, a concept that family courts tend to ignore.

As Franklin writes, maybe it is time already to start listening to our kids.