CHILDREN’S RIGHTS DISCOURSE IN SOUTH KOREA

Open Access
- Author:
- Lee, Seungyeon
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Theory and Policy
- Degree:
- Master of Arts
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- June 24, 2016
- Committee Members:
- David Post, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Maryellen Schaub, Committee Member
Gerald K Letendre, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Children
Right
Korea
History - Abstract:
- A recent incident of child abuse in a daycare center in the Republic of Korea illuminates the evolution of children’s rights discourse in that country and the trend worldwide. A single incident of child abuse resulted in a critical and eruptive reactions in Korea, and the discussions generated a tremendous amount of concerns. These concerns for children, as we will see in this thesis, would never have been expressed in the 1920s, when children’s rights discourse occurred for the first time of Korean history. Previous definitions of child abuse and exploitation were different from current definition. Even though children were beaten, this was widely accepted as social norm. The gap between the concerns and the status of children’s rights between the 1920s and today seems to be large. How did this change occur? This thesis focuses on the evolution of children’s rights discourses in Korea to answer that question. After considering evidence provided from news articles between 1920 and 1989, the views of children and children’s rights prior to ratification of the Convention on the Right of the Child may have been affected by a domestic child right movement and the United Nations during and after the international child right movements such as the Pledge to Children’s right of 1957, the Declaration on the Right of the Child in 1959 and the announcement of International Year of the Child in 1979. With the combination of the positive impression from the western cultures, and the familiar idea of ensuring children’s rights, the discourse in Korea evolved to create a fertile field for the cultivation of ideas about children’s rights. By the time the Convention on the Right of the Child was proposed in 1989, Korea was ready to accept the international treaty.