Children's Television Charter

The Children's Television Charter affirms the rights of children that are identified in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, as these relate to television programming for and about children. The charter was presented by advocates for children's television led by Anna Home, head of Children's Programmes, Television, BBC, to the First World Summit on Children and Television, held in Melbourne, Australia, in March 1995. It was revised and approved at the Prix Jeunesse Round Table in Munich, May 1995, and has been adopted in many countries around the world.

The charter took its lead from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (ratified by nearly all countries, though not by the United States), which asserts children's rights to freedom of expression through any medium of the child's choice (Article 13) and to mass media that disseminate information and material of social and cultural benefit to the child, with particular regard to the linguistic needs of minority and indigenous groups and to protection from material injurious to the child's well-being (Article 17). Thus, the Children's Television Charter asserts children's rights to receive quality programs; to see and express themselves, their culture, their language, and their life experiences through the media; and to have access to media that affirm their sense of self, community, and place.

Specifically, the charter states:

• (1)
  Children should have programmes of high quality which are made specifically for them, and which do not exploit them. These programmes, in addition to entertaining, should allow children to develop physically, mentally and socially to their fullest potential;
• (2)
  Children should hear, see and express themselves, their culture, their languages and their life experiences, through television programmes which affirm their sense of self, community and place;
• (3)
  Children's programmes should promote an awareness and appreciation of other cultures in parallel with the child's own cultural background;
• (4)
  Children's programmes should be wide-ranging in genre and content, but should not include gratuitous scenes of violence and sex;
• (5)
  Children's programmes should be aired in regular slots at times when children are available to view, and/or distributed via other widely accessible media or technologies;
• (6)
  Sufficient funds must be made available to make these programmes to the highest possible standards; and
• (7)
  Governments, production, distribution and funding organisations should recognise both the importance and vulnerability of indigenous children's television, and take steps to support and protect it.

The charter specifies a set of benchmark principles to help protect good-quality children's television. The charter was subsequently extended to include all electronic media at the Third World Summit in Thessaloniki in 2001, and it is now variously named, in different countries, the Children's Charter on Media, or Electronic Media, or Television. The charter has stimulated a series of international meetings in which senior broadcasters, media professionals, and researchers have met periodically since 1995 to develop a series of action points for implementing the charter. At the Second World Summit in London, children produced their own charter as well. However, although widely supported, it seems that, as yet, there have been few national and no international attempts to evaluate the success of the charter in altering the media landscape for children around the world.

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