Democratic referendums exclude the very population child-protection laws protect.

Evidence

What the referendum demonstrated is a specific limitation of democratic participation in the context of children’s rights: children could not vote in the referendum. The question being voted on primarily concerned the legal rights of children — specifically, whether children should have equal legal protection from assault. But children are not voters. The democratic mechanism that the opposition successfully deployed to challenge child protection legislation was a mechanism that excluded the population the legislation was protecting. — , The Rod and the Child, 10072

Categorization

• SEED: Strong angle: an essay on the structural democracy problem where the population most affected by a law is the only one with no vote, using Section 59 as the case study.
• XREF: Connects to the 2001 DGD critique that children’s participation risks merely ratifying adult decisions, and to CRC Article 12. — connects to: Children constitute a political constituency constitutionally unable to enforce their own rights — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 10130; Welfare is the only democratic administration excluding its own beneficiaries from participation — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 415

Related

• Children constitute a political constituency constitutionally unable to enforce their own rights (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Children constitute a political constituency constitutionally unable to enforce their own rights #expands (0.80) — , The Rod and the Child, 10130