Using a human rights lens: Learning from children's activism

A new wave of children’s activism is gathering apace, from children’s school strikes for climate change, to the call for gun control in the USA. As children claim their own spaces, for their own priorities, this provides an opportunity for the children’s human rights field to consider how it can support such initiatives and also learn from them. This chapter asks how children’s activism can be understood through a human rights lens, drawing on researched examples of children’s activism to illuminate the answers. The chapter concludes by suggesting how such activism encourages support for children’s participation beyond the minimum requirements of the UN Convention on the Rights of Child, recognises children as political actors, repositions children as knowledge holders, and thus redistributes power within intergenerational relations.