I’ve recently been interested in exploring the tensions between the enactment in 1989 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child and the decline in the conditions of children worldwide that have occurred as a result of the structural adjustment policies that began with neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s. I was perplexed by the fact that though all but two nations ratified the Convention (Somalia and the United States were the exceptions), and many states proclaimed interest in protecting the rights of the child, few states in practice actual follow the terms of the Convention, particularly with respect to children’s rights in legal procedures.
While researching the Convention, I learned that government officials in Mozambique adopted the terms of the Convention fully into their national laws, recognizing that the stated claims of the Convention could be used to eradicate child poverty. The rights of children could be interpreted as the rights to live happy and healthy lives, free of poverty.
Assuming that Mozambique’s unique interpretation of the Convention might result in unique juvenile justice practices, I began to look for information about their juvenile justice system. Sadly, the results of my search were depressing. I found this article from The New York Times which looked at the conditions of young offenders in a number of African nations, and found that despite the fact that many of these nations had ostensibly strict allegiance to the tenets of the Convention, young offenders suffer terribly in these nations.
Though I am reluctant to generalize about African nations, I write about this issue more broadly to try to suggest that the disjuncture between several of these nations’ stated desires to eradicate child poverty and their inability–as a result of structural dependence on global bodies like the World Bank–to resolve the problems of poverty. The negative side-effects of structural adjustment policies, which withdraw money from public institutions and focus on private investment, among other things, is to pull money away from institutions that serve women and children in particular, like schools, hospitals, and, as we see, prisons. Though I don’t want to suggest that prisons should benefit from public spending entirely–in fact, I believe that public investment in resolving social inequality may have a kind of ‘trickle-down’ impact on crime–I do think that global economic policies propagated by developed nations prevent countries like Mozambique from acting autonomously to develop policies consonant with their goals.
To read more about child justice in Africa, see here.
