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Measuring child poverty from a children's rights perspective

Josue Sauri Garcia, El Colegio de Mexico

Child poverty is typically viewed from an adult's perspective. As it is true that most research on the issue takcle the importance of taking care of children at the early ages in vulnerable social contexts, the measures use the same dimensions reducing child poverty to 3 key components: education, health and housing. The main issue of these measurements is that they assign deprivations to children based on household income that are totally dependent of the economic context of the location in which children live, making children poorer in countries where social infrastructure is still deficient. The present research asks the question: how can child poverty be observed focusing on the participation principle of the Convention of the Rights of the Children to select and determine the dimensions and variables used to measure it? Using the experience from Mexican data, the research aims to implement variables which are directly taken from child population, such as births under registration, nutrition status and homicide mortality, among others. Early results suggest that measuring poverty from a children's rights perspective show a tendency for vulnerability on rights access that is never lost and, in some cases, it grows as the population ages to teenagerhood.

Keywords: Children and youth, Ethics and human rights, Family demography

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P5.