Understanding children’s rights: Perspectives from street children in Dhaka

Abstract

In this thesis, I critically aim to examine how rights are understood and articulated by street children in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The relationship between children’s rights as commissioned in the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and the implementation of them has garnered considerable attention from scholars in Geography and other cognate fields in social science such as sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and development studies. Yet, there are significant issues that have not been addressed in detail. My thesis aims to contribute to existing knowledge and understanding through providing further insight into children’s rights from their own perspectives that emerge from specific cultural contexts in Bangladesh. To this end, I will focus on the ways in which children discuss and understand the meaning of rights; the ways in which the meaning of rights is understood from children’s everyday lives; the daily struggle and power dynamics between adults and children that may affect the process of children’s understanding of rights.

I engage with children in three sites in Dhaka, represented by three collaborating NGOs, using interviews, observations, and visual methods. Learning about children’s perspectives requires adopting strategies to understand their everyday lives. The methods I choose are particularly important to discovering the linkages between the lives of the children and that of adults who often have a dominant role in their lives. I discuss critically the linkages among children’s rights, children’s everyday lives, and adult intervention in Bangladesh. To engage with the aims and purposes of this thesis, I use an ethnographic approach, which helps me to understand children’s experiences and views of their lives in which the meaning of rights is intricately connected with participation and citizenship. The approach further draws me to children’s decision-making abilities and choices. These are often laden with children’s powerlessness. The interrogation of children’s lives exposes the challenges of promoting their voices within geographical circumstances of marginalisation and power struggle. The thesis demonstrated how street children imagined and articulated rights from their own lived experiences. However, there is a need to pay further attention to the opportunities they do not get to talk about their rights. In this vein, it concludes by recognising that further research in children’s geographies on how children’s voices can foreground new debates and discussions about enhancing the status of marginalised children and their rights across societies.