Zulfi Ali asks whether we can still claim to be standing by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

I have been involved in organising celebrations for World Children’s Day since its inception in 1989. Yet this year, on its thirty-fifth anniversary, I am struggling to find the energy or the enthusiasm to do so.

Recently I got a chance to travel and meet my nephew’s daughter, who was just a few months old at the time. I remember imagining a conversation with her, in the not very distant future, about the world we are passing onto her generation. Since then, I keep picturing her and her friends asking me questions, blending innocence with brutal honesty, as children do, about the state of the world and why things are as they are. What would I say to them? How would I answer their questions? What explanations would I give? Who would I blame?

World Children’s Day is celebrated globally on the 20^th of November every year, to mark the adoption in 1989 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the most widely ratified Convention in the world (ratified by every UN member state except the USA). Accompanying UNCRC were promises of transformative changes around the three Ps: commitments that all children would be protected from, for example, neglect, abuse, poverty and conflict; guarantees that all children would be provided with, for example, healthcare, food, and education; and assurances that spaces would be created for children’s participation in shaping the world.

As we get drawn deeper into a polycrisis of our own making, we have failed on all three of these pledges. We may have ticked the boxes, completed the paperwork, and fulfilled our public relations requirements, but we have let our children down.

The clear conclusion from the ongoing COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, is that we are failing to take adequate action to prevent the environmental and civilisational collapse we are facing. The predictions made by scientists get darker by the day. We routinely see extreme weather events, with dire consequences, unfold on our screens in real time. Yet, we in the Global North continue with business as usual, while those living in the Global South, who contributed little to the crises, continue to pay the heaviest price. Analysis by Save the Children shows that one in eight of the world’s children have already been directly impacted by the ten biggest extreme weather events so far this year. It is unbearable to contemplate in any detail what lies ahead.

According to estimates by UNICEF and Save the Children, over one billion children live in multi-dimensional poverty. That is nearly half of the children in the world, living in poverty at precisely the same time as, according to Forbes, the wealth of 2,781 billionaires increased in 2024 by $2 trillion dollars.  In the UK (the fifth richest country in the world), the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that in 2021/22, 29% of the children were living in poverty. Meanwhile, we remain unwaveringly obsessed by celebrity and wealth, and continue to airbrush inconvenient social problems out of the dominant narratives of our time.

The United Nations estimates that globally, nearly half a billion children are living in conflict zones. According to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, ‘the number of child victims of the six grave human rights violations verified by the UN rose exponentially in 2024, particularly in Gaza, Sudan and Myanmar’. The very real danger of nuclear annihilation does not even get the role of an extra in the drama that is unfolding.

Today, the promises made to children in the UNCRC ring hollow. We are repeating what we said we would never repeat. As the Indian activist Arundhati Roy points out, the ‘Never’ in ‘Never Again,’ the phrase that led to the birth of the UN after the Second World War, has been erased, leaving just ‘Again’.  We are witnessing the normalisation of extreme inequalities, acute poverty, relentless conflict, and genocide. Future generations will look back at this pivotal moment in history and ask us what were we thinking? They will demand to know what led to our inaction. They will judge us for our silence.

As citizens, and particularly as educators, we are all accountable. We cannot afford to be helpless bystanders. Each one of us needs to find something to say to children on this World Children’s Day, for silence would mean we are complicit. If nothing else, we should at least be able to say we tried, for inactivity in these times would be unforgivable.

The French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once remarked that, ‘I have come to believe that those who have the good fortune to be able to devote their lives to the study of the social world cannot stand aside, neutral and indifferent, from the struggles in which the future of that world is at stake.’  

For far too long, education has been positioned as detached from the social struggles around us. We are told to aim for objectivity and neutrality. Education has become parochial, narrowing its focus to employability, competition and the markets. The millions of children around the world who are marching, protesting, and demanding action are the hope, not just for the future but for right now. We need to listen to them and put all our energies in making education socially relevant again. We should be able to say to our children that we will join them and support them in the struggle back to sanity. It is only through our actions that we may gain forgiveness on this World Children’s Day.

Zulfi Ali is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Educational Studies.