Childhood Copyright © 2008

Notions of children’s rights inform the ways contemporary thinking about children has been shaped. Recent thinking on children and childhood, as the aims and scope of this journal states, ‘has called for an international, cross-disciplinary view of the culture, economics, language, health and social networks of childhood and children, with an emphasis on their rights and position in society’. The sentence suggests a relationship between children’s rights, cul-ture and childhood. But what kind of relationship is it? What does it tell us about such prominent children’s rights issues as child soldiers, children in prostitution, street children, child labour, aids orphans, female genital mutila-tion and so on? The current understanding is that these issues are somehow related to the cultures in which they arise. These cultures would somehow be impervious to enlightened insights on the nature of childhood. Indian culture would, for example, inform a caste-based social order in which the children of the lower castes would be condemned to work instead of going to school. Thai culture would be relatively tolerant towards child prostitution. African culture