Spirituality, health equity & structural justice: Some reflections on children's rights

In Canada, the resources needed to enjoy good health are unequally distributed. In child populations, this includes needs such as income, housing and food security, which are fundamental indicators of health equity. Yet, children can have their basic tangible needs met and still be far from living fulfilling lives. Intangible resources—such as spirituality—are also essential to flourishing.

The term spirituality often carries with it “conceptual baggage”, which may be one of the reasons that the spiritual dimension of health is essentially ignored by mainstream health agendas and not often considered in a robust manner in children’s rights discussions. This is short sighted. Spirituality is an important indicator of health equity, and the 35-year anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which recognizes spirituality four times, is an opportune time to consider the relationship between spirituality, structural justice, and flourishing.

The goals of this presentation are: 1) to locate the spiritual dimensions of a child’s life in the context of Canadian health research and children’s rights discourse ; 2) using contemporary evidence and social determinants of health thinking, to position spirituality as inseparable from rights and justice; and 3) to think collaboratively about how this thinking could be used by duty bearers to create a country in which all children have the resources they need to thrive.

Dr. Valerie Michaelson is an Associate Professor in Health Sciences at Brock University. Her collaborative and change-generating research focuses on health equity, children’s rights and spiritual rights. In addition to studying how social, structural and cultural contexts shape health and well-being, Dr. Michaelson also explores the complex ways that culture, religion and spirituality shape human beliefs, attitudes and behaviours, including in relation to colonization. The majority of her transdisciplinary and reciprocal research focuses on child and adolescent populations.