Vietnam's Children in a Changing World

Seven

164 Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World Seven Childhood without Discrimination 164 In this chapter, I look at the UNCRC’s applicability to children whose particular circumstances make it more likely that they might be discriminated against, examining in particular some of the ways in which a Vietnamese child’s gender or disability can contribute to the shaping of his or her life. I focus on these two areas because along with race, they are probably the most obvious bases of discrimination. It was just after I arrived in Hanoi that the “girl child” had become the focal point for new projects to be funded by international aid agencies. I had the opportunity at the same time to observe the work of some of the childfocused NGOs that were becoming involved in projects to make mainstream education inclusive, enabling children with disabilities to be educated within a normal school. So it was fortuitous timing that afforded me an excellent opportunity to observe at firsthand the workings in practice of some of the UNCRC’s principles in relation to these two project streams. Two articles of the UNCRC are of relevance. Article 2 states that parties are required to “ensure the rights set forth in the present UNCRC . . . without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the child’s or his or her parents or legal guardian’s race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other status.” Article 23 recognizes that a mentally or disabled child should Childhood without Discrimination 165 enjoy a full and decent life; it also states that the child should have effective access to education while achieving the fullest possible social integration. One of the problems I found when attending child rights–focused NGO meetings was that there was a tendency for expatriate NGO staff to discuss their immediate environment (in this case Vietnam) in terms of its failure to adhere to all aspects of the UNCRC. But, as I have argued elsewhere in this book, the scale of the UNCRC’s ambitions makes its full implementation an impossible task: while some improvements are being made in children’s lives there are many obstacles, economic and social, within most societies (including that of Vietnam) that will not be overcome simply because the UNCRC has now been ratified. I observed, however, that incremental successes were being achieved when NGOs focused, intentionally or otherwise, on very particular objectives written into the UNCRC and then worked hard to achieve the goals of one aspect of it, using more tangible, practice-centered techniques. Broadly speaking, this was the case with the inclusive education program I observed in progress, which relates to Article 2 of the UNCRC. The school I visited had been established by the Vietnamese government rather than international aid agencies, while the inclusive education program that had been set up within it was partly funded both by child rights NGOs and by NGOs that did not have any commitment to the UNCRC. So for once there was a broadly based support, both domestic and international, for the programs. In the first part of this chapter I discuss the circumstances of girl children living in a government-run orphanage; I argue that while it is important to understand the specifics of their lives, this should not be done to the exclusion of the boys who lived alongside them. By overlooking the experiences of “boy children,” one might inadvertently attribute particular benefits and hardships to one gender without ever knowing if an experience is actually gender specific or not. To provide an underlying societal context, I have analyzed some of the more general aspects of gender relations within Vietnamese society, since having an insight into some of the ways that Vietnamese society treats men and women differently helps us to understand what kind of aid might be needed, and the most appropriate (that is, culturally specific) form it might take. In the second part of the chapter, I move on from gender to disability. Here, I examine the workings of the UNCRC by discussing the successes 166 Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World and failures of the introduction of inclusive education programs being supported by NGOs. I do this by focusing attention on the experiences of some visually impaired children who were included within a mainstream school as part of the new inclusive initiative. I discovered that...