Edmund Burke said: "Custom reconciles us to everything." And taking a global audit of the state of children's rights and child citizenship at the start of a new millennium we can see that societies in both the developed and developing world remain reconciled to the custom of children being second class citizens. The human race seems unable to cross the final and ultimate human rights frontier by acknowledging children as equal citizens.
Consider the following stark facts about children:
Approximately two million children world-wide die every year from the six vaccine-preventable illnesses: whooping cough, measles, pertussi, polio, tetanus and tuberculosis.
Over 250 million children between the ages of five and 14 are working in the developing world (one out of every four children).
Only 68 per cent of children in developing countries complete even four years of basic education.
The Amsterdam Treaty remains silent on the specific rights of children.
In 1994, 29.3 per cent of Irish children lived beneath the poverty line.
Only eight countries in the world protect children from physical punishment or assaults by parents or carers. In almost every country in the world children continue to be denied the most fundamental human right to total bodily integrity under the law of assault.
Violence towards children in the form of corporal punishment is legal and acceptable in most countries including Ireland and Britain.
The United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child which has been signed by nearly every country in the world presents parents, adults, policy makers and government with a chance to make valuing childhood the theme and reality of the new millennium.
The Convention consists of 53 articles which clearly recognise that the rights of children are possessed by them by virtue of their human existence, independent of the state or adults granting them their rights. The Convention is clear that when adults or organisations make decisions which affect children they must always think first about what would be best for the child.
It also emphasises that children too have the right to say what they think about anything which affects them. What they say must be listened to carefully. When courts or other official bodies are making decisions which affect children they must listen to what the children want and feel.
In identifying children's rights as universal, indivisible and absolute, the Convention fosters positive child rearing and state protection of children within a whole new mindset. Children are seen not as potential victims or potential delinquents but as citizens and consumers of state services such as health, education and juvenile justice.
Patriarchal, authoritarian and punishment based child rearing models of the past have created a world full of violence, aggression, greed and imperialism. The roots of all global injustice, racism, domestic violence and child abuse are grounded in such values.
Eliminating global injustice, racism, violence and war must surely start by changing such values. It is only by creating democracy, equity and justice as core principles of child rearing (if necessary with State and international support) that we can give global reality to a safer, more just and peaceful world in the new millennium. We live in a new and potentially better world in which it takes a global village to rear a child.