Our Approach Towards Child Rights

We've learned that the only way to make lasting change happen is to adopt what we call the 'child rights approach'. Stripped of all jargon, what this entails is:

first, looking at children's issues in their entirety, rather than through the narrow prisms of education, health, child labour, child abuse, foeticide/infanticide etc.
then, seeking the underlying root causes of the deprivation-gender, caste, livelihoods, displacement and the like
and finally, mobilising each local community to find long-term solutions to these problems by ensuring the relevant laws and policies that guarantee their rights are actually implemented.

Partnering NGOs and communities across India over the past three decades, CRY has conclusively proven that sustainable change is possible. But only when communities have the information and the motivation to come together to fight for their children's rights. That child rights cannot be ensured unless families have their livelihoods assured. That more critical than economic input is governance.

In a nutshell, CRY believes in child rights for three reasons - because the alternatives are ineffective, illegal and unjust.

To ensure a step in the right direction, we urge to each of you to start by thinking of children in their entirety, as citizens with rights guaranteed to them in the Constitution of India as well as when India signed the UN Child Rights Charter in 1992. Children are not objects of sympathy or our charity, however well-intentioned, but citizens with the same rights that we consider our due.

To enable a change on a significant scale, we need to believe, really believe, that every child, regardless of birth and circumstances is truly equal.

That we realise that each child who does not have access to a real education, each child who is compelled to work for a living, each child who is killed, neglected, abused or exploited represents a far more serious violation of our constitution, equivalent to a crime.