Rights, Not Charity

At CRIN, we promote rights, not charity, for children and young people. We believe using images of smiling or starving children to obtain donations does nothing to prevent the causes of the problems they face; it merely evokes a sense of pity and charity, which fixes nothing. Instead, we want to provoke change to advance children’s rights. To this end, we need to strike at the heart of the status quo, and this requires changing the narrative.

Fundamentally, all children and youth are people with human rights and freedoms of their own, just like anyone else. And this is not because they are “the future” or the “adults of tomorrow” - as they are often labelled - but because they are human beings today with human rights today. The artwork below was created with this message in mind, and aims to encourage audiences to think critically about how societies view and treat children and young people.

“I ask no favour for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

— Sarah Moore Grimké, abolitionist, writer, and suffragette

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”

― Khalil Gibran, writer and visual artist

“Who is heard and who is not defines the status quo. Those who embody it, often at the cost of extraordinary silences with themselves, move to the center; those who embody what is not heard or what violates those who rise on silence are cast out. By redefining whose voice is valued, we redefine our society and its values.”

— Rebecca Solnit