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Civil rights for minors concerns me. When you think that times are changing and rules being changed as society decides it appropriate, what say do children get in the decision making process that affects their lives ?

Since the birth of the Internet, what is happening is that people are becoming more and more aware of the different countries, their laws, their ways of dealing with minors, and even from state to state, the differences are astounding. Take for example the age at which a child can have a private consultation with a doctor without parents being told about it. This is a really bad sticking point because what happens is that the child's rights are taken away in favor of their parents and are non existent. Say, for example the child has some awful socially unacceptable disease. Should parents be told, or should the child be able to have that disease treated in privacy, thus retaining some dignity.

It goes further than that. In a world where young children are being sold out to prostitution in the world at the age of 14 years old, what rights do they have to do anything to make their lives better ? This may be in far off countries, though it happens. Children are being sold into marriage by unscrupulous parents in other societies in the world, and we sit back, watch it on the news, and can do nothing to protect the rights of those children, except sympathize, although are the restrictions we place on children morally any better ? Is the protection we offer them by placing age restrictions on certain activity really working ? Are we naive enough to think that by keeping the child ill informed we are doing them any favors ?

Exploitation of children goes much further than many of us accept, though there are two sides to the coin. On the one hand, we make rules to protect children from harm, imposing age restrictions to driving, to working part time, deciding what is acceptable for our children to do, and then on the other hand abuse those children by expecting them to do more work for less money, to take cash payments because we don't want the age of a child to be registered when they decide to deliver newspapers on the cheap. You can't have it both ways, and instead of protecting the children, these restrictions are making those children that cross the line between legality and illegal actions simply mean that those kids step into an area where they are less noticed by society, and therefore less protected.

Take for example sex education, and the manner

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