By Chris Cusano

The mention of children's rights in Thailand recalls to many minds disturbing tales of abuse. In 1984 a fire gutted a brothel in Phuket, where the charred skeleton of a child prostitute was discovered, chained to the bed where she was sold. Adolescent girls are routinely brokered to massage parlors, in order to pay off their parents' debts. Children who should be in second grade wander barefoot through Bangkok's effusive traffic, selling garlands and newspapers.

Cambodian migrants are trucked in from the border to panhandle on the streets of the capital – tiny foot soldiers in a vast and well-organized begging syndicate. Young Burmese whose homes have been razed and fields planted with mines escape to Thailand and spend years in menial servitude as housemaids, construction workers and farm hands. And over these colonies of neglected young hover pedophiles, Thai and foreign alike, their sharp eyes searching.

These tragedies – all true, widespread, and ongoing – deserve the outrage they evoke. But there is another volume without which the tale is incomplete. For, rising to meet its great challenges, Thailand has built a vibrant, creative and ever-growing children's rights movement that, as often as it is able, both rescues children from misery and restores to them a peaceful and promising childhood.

The Center for the Protection of Children's Rights joins forces with police to liberate children held in bondage. The Child Protection Foundation helped establish laws that protect child plaintiffs and witnesses.

On national Children's Day, 2000, the Hilltribe Children's Fund loaded 100 ethnic minority kids onto buses and took a freedom ride to the Thai Prime Minister's office, 500 kilometers away, to stake their claim – their right – to Thai citizenship. At Children's Village in Kanchanaburi Province, troubled teens, abused children and orphans sit in their own parliament that governs the community. And too many others to list here, in the mountains, plains and cities, stand up to acknowledge the suffering they see and the responsibility they feel to restore the dream of childhood.

These are all the efforts of Thai organizations, of Thai citizens, who share an insuperable commitment to justice and a sustaining vision of a child's right to childhood. Unless one sees the hope and vision they offer, then neither the ideals nor the facts are complete. There is nothing naïve in the idealism of children's rights; the ideals are the remedy for a world gone wrong.