Random Law Review # 6

Laura Lundy's Mainstreaming Children's Rights In, To, and Through Education in a Society Emerging from Conflict, 14 International Journal of Children's Rights 339 (2006).

This was an interesting, well-written article on a subject I had never really thought about before: the impact of the violence in Northern Ireland on schoolchildren there. Only about 5% of schoolchildren attend integrated schools, while the rest attend homoegenous Catholic or homogenous Protestant schools. Violence between schoolchildren of competing religions is common on the way to and from school, as is graffitti and bullying at school. The article talks about the mostly failed role of international children's rights treaties in ameliorating the problem and about how children's rights provisions in a proposed domestic Bill of Rights received heavy criticism from the public. There's not a lot of optimism here about the future, but instead a sense of how difficult it is for societies torn by ethnic or religious rivalries to make education both safe and effective.