Vietnam's Children in a Changing World

Three

Child Rights and the International Community 53 Three Child Rights and the International Aid Community 53 In February 1997 the director of an international NGO that worked with children but had no interest in working in the field of child rights invited me to join him and his Vietnamese staff to watch a short film produced by members of an international child rights NGO working in Hanoi. When we saw the film it was still a rough cut of the final version and did not at that point have a title. As far as I know the film was never completed, because its contents meant that it was most unlikely to meet government approval . The film set out to explore the extent to which the child rights movement was having any positive influences over the lives of children living in difficult circumstances in Vietnam. Most of the filming had taken place on the streets of Hanoi among “street children” who lived in makeshift housing down by the river and who spent their days working long hours doing street-based work. In the film individual children spoke directly to the camera about the difficulties they experienced while working: the long hours they kept, how much they missed their families, and being vulnerable to arrest by the police . As each interview drew to a close, the commentator interjected with a child rights–linked assessment of the situation; for example, after a child had spoken of having to work long hours the commentator pointed out “Article 32 of the UNCRC recognizes the right of a child to be protected from 54 Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World economic exploitation, and this example shows that the Vietnamese are not doing enough to adhere to this objective.” Throughout the film I do not recall the commentator having anything positive to say about Vietnamese people’s treatment of their children. The film drew to a close with the camera panning in on a young boy who started to cry as he told his story of working long hours. Rather than pull away at this moment the camera was focused in on the boy’s face, and the interviewer asked him if he was aware that he had the right to change his circumstances because Vietnam had ratified the UNCRC. The boy looked a little lost and confused as he shook his head. He had never heard of the UNCRC. As the film faded and the screen turned blank the commentator concluded that “It is an outrage that children are living and working in such appalling conditions, although Vietnam has ratified the UNCRC it is doing nothing to help these children improve their lives.” Once the television was turned off there was silence in the room. There was a reason for this. The film was openly critical of the Vietnamese government’s apparent failings to adhere to the UNCRC in a way that we all knew to be risky for the people involved in making the film. As a result nobody felt comfortable or particularly interested in talking about the film, and everybody, including Chinh and Tung, two of the Vietnamese staff members of the NGO with whom I visited the reform school, quickly left to get on with the business of the day. While it was easy to empathize with the experiences of the children in the film, none of their experiences were new to us, and I wondered what type of audience the filmmakers had in mind. The film was unsettling, but as far as I was concerned not for the reasons that the filmmakers were hoping . At that time the film had not been approved by the government and was still only making the internal rounds of various international NGOs. Eighteen months later, when I left Vietnam, the film had still not been given the government’s seal of approval and instead had become a costly white elephant project for the NGOs that had developed and funded it. This chapter examines a number of questions that I first began to think about after watching the film. First, is it appropriate for the UNCRC—which Vietnam only signed in 1989 and ratified in 1990—to be used as a critical yardstick against which to measure the daily experiences of Vietnamese children? In addition, should responsibility for the conditions under which Child Rights and the International Community 55 certain people live reside with...