False divisions and dubious equivalencies: Children’s rights during the COVID-19 pandemic

Chapter in Children’s rights in crisis

ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the causes and consequences of the current crisis in children’s rights during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically how and why children’s fundamental rights to life, health, and safety are besieged in the context of education and schooling. It scrutinizes the laissez-faire pandemic response of minimal mitigations in comparative global perspective, with the United States exemplifying this model and faring worst among peer nations, alongside the United Kingdom and Sweden. Using an intersectional framework regarding systemic inequities, it analyzes policies regarding school reopenings and pandemic mitigations through a review of relevant news media, surveys, statistical data, and public discourse. The master narrative regarding childhood education during the pandemic has created false divisions and dubious equivalencies between different sets of children’s rights to justify in-person schooling with inadequate mitigations. Political officials, economic elites, contrarian “experts,” and aligned technocrats advanced laissez-faire policy fueled by disinformation campaigns, moral panic, and political violence, to overpower scientific consensus, public opinion, and human rights, which disproportionately harms working-class and racial minority children.