Isabel Marcus describes domestic violence as terrorism in the home, and she is not alone in making this observation. However, intra-familial violence continues to be viewed pervasively as qualified violence. This qualification gives rise to a privileging distinction between the perceived gravity of events that occur in the public sphere, and the perceived lesser gravity of those that are perpetrated in the family and the home. This public/private dyad permeates mainstream perceptions of human rights, and who is entitled to protection under their ambit.
If naming is a political activity, a failure to name is no less political. In the human rights discourse what is normalised as human rights is what is named as human rights, what is not named is necessarily excluded from the concept and its entitlements. To take this a step further, the prevailing definitions of human rights as primarily civil and political matters establishes whose lives are considered fully human, in terms of the right to have their suffering acknowledged and attended to by human rights instruments.
This is a serious matter. If one is to make the claim for human rights, one must include everything human within the ambit of that claim. The public/private dyad cannot be maintained, without the implication that the private is less significantly human. Are certain bodies more worthy of having protective human rights than others? Are certain sufferings to be considered less than others because of the arena in which they were perpetrated? In other words, what is and is not speakable in human rights discourse in Australia today, and what does that tell us about ourselves, and the society we are continually constructing?
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Human rights commentator, Associate Professor Roger Levesque, observes that international human rights law offers a global sense of moral and social obligation, of community responsibility and mutuality, through the introduction of rudimentary universal standards and principles that seek to regulate how humans treat one another. Human rights law enables a process of cultural change. As is evident in the Australian statistics, and as Levesque points in his survey of American statistics, in spite of the rising awareness of, and concern about child sexual abuse in western countries, there is no corresponding drop in its incidence. This suggests that some profound change is urgently required in the perceived status of children in western democracies.
There is an urgent need for us to rethink our familiar ideologies of childhood and family. Human rights law argues that children do not belong to their parents, children belong to themselves, and have the same fundamental human rights entitlements as adults. For this reason alone, child abuse and child sexual abuse is just as much a human rights issues as is any other form of exploitation and discrimination inflicted upon adults. As long as we do not grant the child’s dignity and sovereignty, we continue to perceive and treat her and him as an object, and not as a subject. This attitude is one of ownership and entitled privacy, that inevitably works to conceal, and frequently justify child abuse.
Human rights law offers the process through which societies can bring about necessary change. This has been shown in our own anti-discrimination legislation, and in countries that have introduced a charter of rights, such as the United Kingdom. Human rights law offers another level of appeal for those who are frequently left without a voice under our current systems of legislation. It demands that we engage in public debate about existing, entrenched patterns of private power. It offers a language and a framework within which we can question hegemonic practices that maintain an unacceptable status quo.
It is unacceptable for a country to be signatory to an international human rights Convention, yet to fail to observe the language of that Convention in its domestic affairs. In Article 19, CROC specifically names the abuse and sexual abuse of children by non-state actors in the private sphere as human rights abuse, yet domestically, we do not.
It is also remarkable and ironic, that while perpetrators of abuses against children are entitled to observation of their human rights when they are imprisoned, no such supportive human rights framework is available for their victims.
There are several possible models for a charter or bill of human rights. Whatever might be eventually decided upon, we must argue that the concept of human rights it is based on is extended beyond the public sphere interpretation, to give equal significance to private sphere abuses against children. The Canadians, for example, already have a Bill of Rights. There has lately been an effort on the part of activists to have what is described as “non-state torture” addressed by the Bill. This includes child abuse and child sexual abuse. We have the opportunity to include these specific considerations in our first federal charter and in that, we will be breaking new ground internationally.
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However, such global leadership will require that those who oppose the charter recognise the expanded concept of human rights that already exists in international conventions, and re-think their arguments from that new position. It will require the same acknowledgement from those who support the charter yet fail to acknowledge private sphere abuse. The unnecessary and unacknowledged dyad of public/private abuse, that is, of abuse and qualified abuse, will need to be dropped from the Australian human rights discourse. Unless our proposed federal charter is written from this foundation it will not be an inclusive charter of human rights, but a charter of the rights of some humans that will inevitably designate those excluded from its ambit as less than fully human. It will be a tragedy and an indictment if those so excluded are our vulnerable children.