Child Advocacy -- Not Political?

This year I'm in a year-long course entitled the Child Advocacy Policy Workshop. It is a speaker series that culminates in a quasi-thought piece later this semester. Speakers with different perspectives on child advocacy have maintained that child advocacy is not political: that the protection of children crosses the political borders and embraces all who commit themselves to the protection of children.

This idea sounds well and good, however, how is "protection" defined? Who decides where the line is drawn between corporal punishment and abuse? Could a schedule filled with ballet, violin, French and etiquette classes be considered abusive for a child developing an ulcer before the age of 10? What about youths involved in extreme athletics (gymnasts for example)? Maybe these activities are not particularly political, but what happens if the issues turn religious? Doesn't any judgment call inevitably turn political?

Most striking, though, is the claim that there is an absence of politics while at the same time the literature on children's rights is filled with references to children's rights via anti-abortion arguments. Some argue that the debate over abortion is a children's issue. How surprising is it for a student to venture into the realm of child advocacy (being told it is apolitical) only to discover that the vast majority of the literature on the Internet about children's rights is actually about abortion?