In 2017, to celebrate their 21st Birthday, Children’s Parliament started their Unfearties Movement. It was an opportunity to bring together like-minded adults across Scotland (and further away!) who shared an interest in making rights real for children. The Unfearties have a code, a manifesto, and an all important badge so they can be spotted in the wild! During Year of Childhood 2021, for Children’s Parliament’s 25th Birthday, our Unfearties Movement underwent a refresh. We developed a an exciting new Welcome Pack with a Reflective Journal and we reached out to both our MCPs and our Unfearties to ask what they wanted/needed from us to ensure adults are realising children’s rights in Scotland.
Since January 2021, Jess, our (then) Year of Childhood Programme Manager, (now) Communications and Campaigns Manager, has been supporting the team to collect stories of Unfeartiness. However, it’s proven a little bit of a challenge — putting the “right” words to a narrative of Unfeartiness often highlights how little we use rights language in our everyday. Instead, it often leads us into dialogue about what experiencing children’s human rights does in actual fact, look and feel like. With this in mind — and because you should never ask someone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself (and because it’s Christmas) — here’s Jess’ version of what (at time of writing, because all experiences continue to build and evolve) Unfeartiness looks and feels like to her…
I’ve often been asked what I knew about children’s human rights before I joined Children’s Parliament, and the truth is (if I’m really honest) not very much. Certainly not enough that I could have stood in front of a class of college students and talked to them about a rights-based approach in Early Years Settings as I did a few weeks ago. I previously worked in mental health, with a big, long-term focus on suicide prevention, particularly within the student sector. I knew about GIRFEC through my experiences as a Volunteer Counsellor at Place2Be, and I felt well-versed through my counselling training about the importance of healthy attachment in babies, but the language of the UNCRC and its 54 Articles had, quite honestly, slipped past me. I believed we should “be nice” to children, and I understood the concept of treating them with dignity, but I found the legalese and the language of the UNCRC quite overwhelming.
Which I think, if I’m honest, is why the approach of Unfeartiness – particularly in the everyday – really appeals to me. It isn’t a rote recitation of the 54 Articles, and I’m not expected to give an academic response to any of the General Comments whenever I wear my badge. It’s a way of being — it’s an understanding that when we treat children with kindness, with empathy, and when we respect and uphold their human dignity, we are offering them the very best outcomes — a positive benefit for our whole community.
When we think about the UNCRC being incorporated into Scots Law, we often think of the big things — we think of children having legal redress, we think of new guidelines, new frameworks, new structures, we talk about duty bearers and whose responsibility it is, and we often slip into jargon and some kind of legalese. All of the above are incredibly important, incredibly exciting, and absolutely should be what we’re talking and thinking about. We do need the UNCRC Bill to be incorporated into Scots Law. We do need to ensure we aren’t “just being nice to children”. We can’t offer them their rights based on moral luck of which adult is with them on any one day. And it is frustrating that this won’t/can’t happen overnight.
However. What interests me most about Unfeartiness isn’t really the big things. Its our everyday behaviours and the way we move through the world. It’s the small moments — the way in which I might talk to a small child on the bus who’s very interested in why I’m carrying my cat in a backpack. It’s watching a bathroom attendant in a railway station notice a parent with three small children and finding them a space where they can all stay together as they use the facilities. It’s hearing about the radiologist who discovered that if they give a baby an MRI after their last bath and last feed, they sleep so deeply they don’t need any medicine to use the machine safely. It’s making friends with new people on trains and asking them where they think children’s human rights fit into their lives. It’s organising a public living room on a beach from the back of a van with 50 primary school children. (Ok, that was a bigger, not quite everyday one – that required a wee bit of planning and a man in a van!) But Unfeartiness is looking a child in the eyes when you’re speaking to them, and bending down to be on their level. It’s asking their opinion on the decisions that impact their lives — and giving them feedback on those opinions or suggestions. (It is, in lots of spaces, things we do with and alongside children everyday. By calling it “Unfeartiness, we’re naming that behaviour, and thus allowing ourselves to notice where it is happening – and where it isn’t.)
In my Comms role, I don’t actually work with children very often, and whilst many of my friends have recently had babies, I really don’t spend much of my time directly engaging with any humans under the age of approx 25. (I’m told my cat doesn’t count here.) So sometimes, it might feel a bit removed for me — even though I work at an organisation dedicated to upholding children’s human rights, even though my entire job is about raising awareness of the impact of a rights-based approach — to feel or recognise that I too am actively playing a role in upholding children’s human rights and sharing their views. And yet…
I am really lucky to be surrounded by a team who thinks and talks about children’s human rights day in, day out. And whilst that isn’t manageable for everyone — I do appreciate other folks and organisations have other competing priorities! — that is also what Unfeartiness means to me. It’s not something we do alone — just as children need adults to uphold their rights, adults need other adults to support them to make rights real. Unfeartiness is something we do together, as a team — a patchwork of small individual interactions between adults and children, adults and adults – a dialogue of kindness, empathy and dignity. It also isn’t something that can only be done one way. Unfeartiness, like a children’s rights-based approach, is very much based in what resources you have available and what environment you’re existing in.
Sometimes Unfeartiness is engaging children through play to share their opinions and experiences about something that affects their lives. Sometimes Unfeartiness is taking those children’s calls to action, sharing them with other adults and supporting other adults to carry the baton forward. And sometimes, Unfeartiness really is as simple as bending down to the level of a small child, meeting their eyes and answering their questions about why on Earth you have brought a cat in a backpack on a bus.
For more information, and to join our Unfearties Movement, please sign up here: https://www.childrensparliament.org.uk/unfearties/become-an-unfeartie/
