A Matter of Rights: Social Inclusion Among Refugee Children in Canada and Sweden

In 2010, Canada accepted approximately 25,000 refugees.  Of these, 25% were children under the age of 15.   Refugee children often have experienced trauma, exploitation and human rights violations, which can make it difficult for them to become fully included in the society they are entering.  The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) obligates States to ensure the social inclusion of all children, including refuges.  While all but two countries have ratified the CRC, few have fully implemented it.  In this paper, we explore the relationship between a country’s level of implementation of the CRC and its level of social inclusion of refugee children.  We examined the policies of Canada, which has made relatively slow progress in implementing the CRC, to those of Sweden, which has extensively advanced CRC implementation by incorporating it into legislation.  We focused on five policy areas particularly relevant to children’s social inclusion: 1) family reunification; 2) health care accessibility; 3) housing accessibility; 4) education accessibility; and 5) economic security.   To measure CRC implementation in each policy area, we developed five CRC Implementation Scales based on criteria recommended in UNICEF’s Implementation Handbook.   Each country was scored on whether the implementation criteria were met in each policy area.  To measure refugee children’s social inclusion, we identified comparable indicators in each country of family reunification; accessibility of health care, housing, and education; and economic security.   As expected, Sweden’s CRC Implementation scores were higher than Canada’s in all five policy areas, and these differences were reflected in a higher level of social inclusion among refugee children in Sweden than in Canada in each of the five areas.  The findings suggest that the well-being of refugee children reflects a country’s level of commitment to upholding their rights.