Children's RIGHTS
Children's rights are all the things that children and young people need to stay safe, be treated fairly and have a say in the decisions that affect their lives.
• Children have a right to feel safe in your relationships with others, and a right to feel safe at home, online, at school, in public places and in the workplace.
• Children have the right to be the best they can be
• Children have the right to information, and be listened to about what you think should happen in decisions that affect them and their lives
• Children have the right to an identity (including their gender identity)
• Children have the right to be free from discrimination (including gender-based discrimination) and media material that causes harm to young people.
• Children have right to relax, play and grow up healthy
• Children have the right to be free from abuse and exploitation (including sexual violence and domestic abuse)
If you want to find out more about children's rights, how to access their rights, or if they feel their rights are not being met, the following organisations can help you:
- The Children's Commissioner for England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
POLICY and LAWS
In Wales...
...there are special policies and guidance designed designed to address sexist, sexual and transphobic bullying, and prevent violence against women and girls, sexual violence and domestic abuse in educational settings.
...there are government policies and acts which have to sort out any discrimination that causes inequalities (including gender inequalities), safeguard children and young people’s health and well-being, and promote children’s rights.
In England...
...there are special policies and guidance designed to address bullying as well as preventing and responding to sexual violence and sexual harassment in school.
...there are government policies and acts which have to sort out any discrimination that causes inequalities (including gender inequalities), safeguard children and young people’s health and well-being, and promote children’s rights.
If you want to know more about sex, relationships and young people's legal rights, go to www.thinkuknow.co.uk. Here you will find simple answers to questions like: What age can young people have sex? What is consent? What is rape? What is sexual assault? What is an indecent image? and more.
If you want to get in touch with any of the politicians who represent you at a local, UK or EU level you can find their details here.
SHARING WHAT YOU DO
You might have noticed that there are very few faces of children and young people on this website. We’ve taken a lot of care to protect the identities of schools and individuals. This is because AGENDA addresses sensitive issues and is publicly available.
Wanting to change things often starts from personal experience, and the desire to share those experiences to a wider audience. There are lots of different ways of communicating experience, especially for those who might not feel confident or safe enough to do so. There are also some good reasons why children and young people’s identities are kept private, from legal reasons to a child’s right to privacy.
Some of the projects in this resource used creative methods to help them raise awareness of sensitive topics without children and young people revealing too much of themselves. Other projects found that their messages were a lot more powerful when they used unusual or creative methods (e.g. Re-assembling the Rules).
For most of the projects, finding ways to create a safe enough environment to share what matters to them was a really important part of their journey.
Why keep children and young people's identity private when sharing their stories on social media (e.g. school's twitter account)?
Keeping children and young people's identity private can help to:
1: communicate personal experiences without revealing too much of themselves;
2: give children and young people more control over when, where and how they want to disclose their identity; and for those children who have to keep their identity private, they are not obviously absent in group photos;
3: protect children and young people from direct contact from online trolls or unwanted media attention more interested in sabotaging rather than supporting their ideas.
Download this Safety and Support PDF here:
