The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

The Declaration of the Rights of the Child, sometimes known as the Geneva Declaration, is an international document promoting child rights; it was drafted by Eglantyne Jebb, embraced by the League of Nations in 1924, and adopted in an extended form by the United Nations in 1959. Today, this living document embodies best practices and principles to ensure that children are recognized, universally, as a human beings who must be able to develop physically, mentally, socially, morally, and spiritually, with freedom and dignity. The articles in this issue explore historical case studies of children’s rights during times of war and environmental disaster, labor and leisure, the child’s right to a family and love, and to be brought up in a spirit of understanding, tolerance, and freedom to participate as full members of society.

This issue begins with an object lesson by Joel Rhodes, who examines the Yorkship Family School Collection in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian. This rich collection consists of letters, photographs, and keepsakes shared by Mrs. Jerry Davis’s 1968 fourth-grade class and their pen pals in the fourth platoon of Company A, First Cavalry Division, serving in the Vietnam War. The voices of children and enlisted men embodied in the collection provide researchers with an example of how a Vietnam-era teacher made the war real and understandable to young children.

National disaster and children’s special right to protection is the theme of Janet Borland and J. Charles Schencking’s study of the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. The co-authors argue that Japanese children were portrayed as distinct sufferers with unique needs on both sides of the Pacific. Children emerged as objects of investigation and of the mobilization of relief efforts, as adults sought to understand how the disaster affected them both physically and mentally. In turn, Japanese children were constructed as ambassadors of gratitude who thanked and moved Americans with their purity and innocence.

Children’s labor rights are the focus of Julie de Chantal’s study of Boston in the late nineteenth century. De Chantal examines the role that the government [End Page 179] played in regulating the hours and working conditions of child labor. Boston area aldermen used their power to ensure that working children received a proper education, were protected from exploitation, and obeyed city laws. In so doing, they created a legitimate space for children’s and teen’s wage work between in the 1880s and 1890s. Moving from children’s labor to leisure and their right to recreational activities, Robert Snape argues that following the rise in juvenile delinquency in the early years of the First World War, the British government set up local youth committees to create positive leisure opportunities for young workers in munitions factories. Although intended as a temporary wartime measure, the juvenile committees were retained and funded under the Education Acts of 1918 and 1921. The bureaucratic nature of the partnership between civil and state bodies involved a surveillance of and intrusion into the private lives of young people and youth welfare programs.

The right of each child to special protection for their physical, mental and social development is central to the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and Scott McKinnon, Shirleene Robinson, and Robert Reynolds’s history of queer childhoods in Australia. Drawing on a large-scale, multigenerational oral history project with Australian gay men and lesbians, the co-authors explore childhoods shaped by memories of difference, including homophobia, heterosexism, and the search for information about queer lives. Listening to the memories of LGBTIQ adults challenges dominant discourses and creates space for queer children in our understandings of the Australian past—and future.

In many ways the articles in this issue reveal the ways children and young adults survive various forms of human rights abuses. The final article looks at the roles of financial compensation and formal apologies for past abuse. Examining Norway, Ingunn Studsrød and Elisabeth Enoksen look at claims of child survivors of out-of-home care abuse, where they were marginalized, deprived of education, safety, care, and affection and exposed to violent behaviour. The...