BlessWorld Foundation International

Affecting the World Through Health
A Global Health Initiative

Adolescents’ Rights

5.03.2018

Blog

Right is an important issue as everyone has some basic human rights including adolescents. These rights often come with a corresponding responsibility to uphold the rights of others such that one person’s right doesn’t interfere with another’s. Knowing and understanding our rights as human beings is essential to preventing bulling and many forms of abuse. For adolescents specifically, reporting to an adult or appropriate authorities is a brilliant way to handle different forms of abuse.

Thefollowing are some basic adolescent rights, and the responsibilities that correspond to them:
• Right: To be cared for and protected by a family.
Responsibility: To care for and respect your family.
• Right: Freedom of speech.
Responsibility: Accord respect to what others say, even if not in agreement.
• Right: To food, shelter, and a healthy environment to live in.
Responsibility: To value and take care of these resources.
• Right: To health care.
Responsibility: To take care of one’s health, and protect oneself from disease.
• Right: To be protected from maltreatment, neglect, abuse or degradation.
Responsibility: To report any act of abuse to oneself or others
• Right: To education.
Responsibility: To make the most of the schooling.
• Right: To equality – this means that people shouldn’t treat adolescents differently based on things like sex or gender, disability, sexuality, race or culture.
Responsibility: To do the same for others, too.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) outlines the rights of adolescents and upholds them as the innate benefit of both girls and boys. UNICEF is guided by the CRC and mandated to invest in adolescents as rights-bearers and a marginalized population. The United Nations Joint Statement on adolescents emphasizes the understanding that healthy, educated and skilled adolescents will help build a better future. As the future of the society, adolescents represent a vital part of the population and their empowerment and protection has broad and significant impacts on their behaviours and the society at large. Adolescent girls have a right to education because girls who stay in school, marry later and delay childbearing- having healthier children and being able to earn better incomes that benefit themselves, their family, community and nations.

Comments are closed.