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Research Article: Child Rights during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Learning from Child Health-and-Rights Professionals across the World

Date Published: 2023-10-09

Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic underscores the importance of a child rights-based approach to policymaking and crisis management. Anchored in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the 3P framework—provision, protection, and participation—forms the foundation for health professionals advocating for children’s rights. Expanding it with two additional domains—preparation and power—into a 5P framework has the potential to enhance child rights-based policies in times of crisis and future pandemics. The study aimed to (1) gather perspectives from child health-and-rights specialists on how children’s rights were highlighted during the early phase of the pandemic in their respective settings; and (2) evaluate the usefulness of the 5P framework in assessing children’s visibility and rights. A qualitative survey was distributed among child health-and-rights professionals; a total of 68 responses were analysed in Atlas.ti 9 from a multi-disciplinary group of policymakers and front-line professionals in eight world regions. As framed by the 5Ps, children’s rights were generally not safeguarded in the initial pandemic response and negatively impacted children’s health and wellbeing. Further, children lacked meaningful opportunities to raise their concerns to policymakers. The 5P framework holds the potential to shape an ethical child rights-based decision-making framework for future crises, both nationally and globally.

Introduction:
With the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) [1], nation-states’ moral obligations towards children, as fostered in the 1924 Geneva Declaration and the earlier Rights of the Child in 1959, became legally obligatory for authorities. The new convention provided governments with guidelines on how to consider children as human rights holders within areas of law and policymaking [2] and as agents with a voice in matters about their welfare [3]. The shift towards a human rights…

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