Protecting children’s rights

We speak to Alison Reid, founder and chief executive of children’s charity Clan Childlaw, about how young people in Scotland can be supported to assert their rights.

Alison Reid’s early career as a Reporter to the Children’s Hearings in Scotland allowed her to see, at close hand, the processes that occurred when the state became involved in young people’s lives, and young people’s subsequent reactions to such processes. With a growing realisation that children’s experiences in these situations was far from ideal, in 2008 Alison decided to start Clan Childlaw: a charity dedicated to improving the ability of children in Scotland to claim their rights.

“The law was OK in Scotland around children’s rights, but I realised that upholding those rights didn’t seem to happen as much in practice,” Alison says.

“It started me thinking: how would a child actually know if they had a legal problem? And if children did realise they had a legal problem, how would they know they needed to find a lawyer to solve it. And even if they knew all of that, where would they go to find a lawyer? Would they walk into a city centre law firm to ask for help? It just seemed  inconceivable.”

Add to that the fact that nobody in the legal system looked as if they inhabited the same world as any young people involved – “coming to meetings really designed for children with suits and briefcases” – and Alison felt a new approach was needed.

“At the time, there was some research in England around what children needed in terms of a lawyer. What it said was, children would like a lawyer who just acts for children and comes into their space,” Alison says.

“That was the basis around which Clan Childlaw was set-up. We decided we needed to be lawyers, but lawyers who knew about children, and we needed to go into the spaces where children were. We are going into their world; we’re not expecting them to come into a lawyer’s world.”

Wider influence

It soon became clear that simply representing children and helping them to access their rights on an individual basis wasn’t going to be the sole aspect of Clan Childlaw’s work. Over the course of its 16 years, Clan has become a notable force for good in a wider context – to the point where its actions have even had a direct influence on shaping Scottish government policy.

“The Scottish government was very interested in the policy issues that we were finding around children’s rights on the ground,” Alison says.

“We started getting involved in policy work and we also started doing training, teaching professionals – such as teachers, social workers, advocacy workers, support workers, and other charities – about the law so they could help children know their rights and ways of accessing their rights. Most of the young people we assist, about 85% to 90%, are care-experienced, and that has been the pattern from the start.

“We then started to look at systemic change and making an impact, not just for the young person in front of us but also much wider. So it wasn’t about improving the situation for one young person but also for other young people in similar situations.”

By using strategic litigation, Clan Childlaw has helped to make significant in-roads in a number of areas, most notably by influencing a change in law that established the right for siblings to be heard in Children’s Hearings and, before that, intervening in a Supreme Court case to raise the issue of children’s rights in relation to information sharing processes. 

UNCRC effect

With the incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child (UNCRC) into Scots Law, there is now potential to do even more with  strategic litigation to improve the lives of children.

“The UNCRC is a huge step forward and it is really exciting. It has had a rocky passage through the Scottish Parliament, Westminster and the Supreme Court, so it has ended up being not quite as fantastic as we had hoped in terms of the scope of the Act. It is  restricted to Acts of the Scottish Parliament and Scottish statutory instruments, which is more limiting,” Alison says.

“However, what is exciting is that there is no need for there to be a ‘victim’ in order to start legal proceedings.  This means that we don’t need to have an individual child leading the case, opening up possibilities for Clan Childlaw and other organisations who are seeing breaches of UNCRC to take action.”

Despite these positive developments, the fundamental question of how easy is it for children and young people to have access to their legal rights remains. Another of Clan’s projects – its collaboration with the Law Society of Scotland to create a ‘Lawyers for Children Certification Course’ – is hoping to be the answer.

“Although we have grown from originally just two of us to a staff of 22, we are still a relatively small children’s charity in Scotland,” Alison says.

“But our vision is to make sure every child in Scotland gets a child-friendly lawyer. I struggled for years with the question of how to achieve that, wondering if Clan Childlaw was going to have to open offices all through Scotland. Of course, the answer is to build capacity with existing lawyers to work in a child-centred way, so that it is not just our lawyers at Clan who are doing it. To that end, working with the Law Society is the obvious answer.”

To find out more about Law Society of Scotland’s ‘Lawyers for Children Certification Course’ visit here.

Not just child friendly – child centred

So what is a child-centred lawyer and what does the course teach?

“I think lawyers need to know about child development. They need to know about communicating with children. They need to know about child protection. They need to know about trauma. They have then got to be able to put that into practice and think about the differences they need to make in order to be child friendly,” Alison says.

“There were lots of discussions around the certification course about the importance of appreciating the role as a lawyer. We are trying to be child friendly, so we are being empathetic and caring, but you also have to have your boundaries around the job that you are doing as a lawyer. You’ve got to be clear with the child, in terms of what you are there to do.

“The examples I always think about are doctors. There’s the huge amount of standard training you need to be a doctor, but to be a paediatric doctor, you have to learn even more. It’s a totally different kind of client that you’ve got to think about. Our vision has been that any child in Scotland who needs a lawyer should be able to get a lawyer who not only knows the law, but who also knows about how to work with children.”

Crucially, Alison says, it is important to be aware that  being a lawyer for children isn’t the same as being an expert in children’s law.

“You can be a lawyer for a child in lots of different areas of law. That was reflected in the first certification course, where we had personal injury lawyers, criminal lawyers, family lawyers. Actually, it’s about anybody who has a child client – it’s about the client group, not the law.”

At the Law Society of Scotland's Annual Conference, Alison was awarded the Legal Pioneer Award. On receiving the award Alison said: 'I am delighted to have been recognised with this award, and that the importance of child-centred legal services has been recognised. I am pleased that our specialised approach to working as lawyers for children and young people is seen as making a significant contribution to Scotland’s legal sector.'

To find out more about Law Society of Scotland’s ‘Lawyers for Children Certification Course’ visit here.

Alison also points out that lawyers don’t have to have completed the course to learn about child-centred legal practice: they can also access resources on being a specialist children’s lawyer through the Lawyers for Children membership here.

Written by Matt Lamy, journalist and writer