Jacqueline Bhabha (Ed.): Human Rights and Adolescence, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2014, 376 pp, Ebook 2014, ISBN: 978-0-8122-9011-0

Excerpt

The rights and privileges of adolescents around the world vary greatly, but the importance of these rights is crucial to the development of adolescents and thus the growth of new generations. It has been seen that the rights of adolescents recently have been going through great changes; however, Human Rights and Adolescence addresses how these privileges must be extended further to make the highly developmental time during adolescence less trying. The book reviews the rights of adolescents and how they compare to that of adults and to children. The first section of the book discusses the different disciplines set in place for adolescents and gaps in approaches to teen development. During adolescence, changes are relevant more frequently and intensely than at any other time in a person’s life, and how is the legal system compensating for this? Not just in the United States, but all around the world, teens are not getting the recognition that they deserve, and thus the authors of the second section of the text acknowledge the different hardships that teens experience as a result of difficult upbringings. In the book’s third and final section, the authors address changes that could be made to ensure that extremely violently raised children can be re-integrated into society to become a positive parts of communities. The section focuses mainly on how the difficult transitions of adolescence can be addressed to help development within the ages of ten to nineteen and not cause harm to children and thus to society as a whole. Overall, the book addresses the difficulties and struggles that encompass being an adolescent in various countries and how changes must be made to the rights of adolescents in order to better the transition between childhood and adulthood. …