Submitted by crinadmin on
Promoting the use of clear language among children’s rights advocates
A trend is emerging among advocates whereby children’s rights are no longer children’s - and all because of an apostrophe. For some reason, the term "children rights" - without the apostrophe and corresponding s - has crept into advocacy papers and speeches. And while it may seem at first sight like a simple typo, it is unfortunately instead a term advocates consciously use, but which, however, is fundamentally deficient for one basic reason: it is grammatically incorrect.
For instance, while human rights and animal rights are terms that do not use apostrophes, it is because human and animal are used as adjectives (hence also animal instinct or human nature as opposed to animals’ instinct or humans’ nature). Children, on the other hand is a plural noun. And so are women and indigenous people. So in the same way that we wouldn't talk about “women rights” or “indigenous people rights” because they are gramatically incorrect - not to mention sounding distinctly odd - we should also steer clear of “children rights”.
But then the question arises of why then is child rights, which follows the same order of noun + noun, on the other hand correct?
It basically comes down to a question of singular vs plural. In the English language we use what are known as modifiers on a daily basis. A modifier is an adjective or noun that attributes a subsequent noun to something. For example, child abuse attributes abuse to children, government policies attributes policies to government, human trafficking attributes trafficking to humans, and child labour attributes labour to children.
But notice that the attributive nouns above (child, government, human) are all singular. This is because plural nouns, such as children, are usually not used as modifiers; only single nouns tend to serve this purpose. Hence why we say human rights (singular) rather than “humans rights” (plural), and child rights (singular) instead of “children rights” (plural) - because in the plural they sound distinctly odd as a result of being grammatically incorrect.
This is not to say, however, that there are exceptions to the singular vs plural rule when it comes to modifiers. But as regards child rights vs “children rights”, the latter is, without exception, redundant.