International human rights scholarship has long treated children’s rights and women’s rights as parallel but separate fields. The girl child, situated at their intersection, has consequently fallen between two bodies of doctrine: too young for feminist legal theory’s emancipatory agenda, too gendered for the ostensibly neutral framework of children’s rights. Chapdelaine-Feliciati’s monograph, developed from her Oxford doctoral thesis, confronts this lacuna head-on, offering the first comprehensive study of the girl child’s legal status under international law through an ambitious interdisciplinary methodology that weds semiotic theory to treaty interpretation.
The book’s analytical engine is Victoria Lady Welby’s ‘Meaning Triad’, which aligns its three components with the interpretive rules of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Sense captures textual meaning and maps onto Article 31(1); meaning addresses drafter intention as discernible through Article 32 and the travaux préparatoires; and significance concerns the ultimate impact on rights, scope and State obligations. Ponzio and Petrilli’s semioethics augments this triad by extending diagnosis into prescription. This framework, dormant in legal scholarship since Jacob de Haan’s 1916 dissertation, is here revived and applied with considerable rigour across eight chapters. Four foundational chapters establish the conceptual apparatus: the semiotic methodology; the definition of the girl child; the twin discriminatory systems of sexism and ‘childism’; and the girl child’s intersectional identity. Four analytical chapters then decode the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), examining the girl child’s identification within the CRC, the boundaries of girlhood, and the uncertain frontier between girlhood and womanhood in the CEDAW.
The central thesis is that treaty terminology itself constitutes a structural barrier to the protection of girl children. The CRC employs gender-neutral language throughout, while systematically placing masculine pronouns before feminine ones. The term ‘girl’ does not appear in any of its substantive provisions. It contains no dedicated article for girl children, unlike its provisions for disabled or refugee children, and is silent on violations predominantly affecting girls. The CEDAW never defines ‘woman’, leaving it radically unclear whether girls fall within its scope. The cumulative effect is a ‘protection gap’: female human beings transitioning between girlhood and womanhood risk falling outside the reach of both instruments.
Where the work makes its most distinctive contribution is not merely in identifying these gaps, which have been noted by scholars such as Askari, Goonesekere and Sohoni, but in grounding the analysis in the drafting histories of the treaties themselves. The travaux préparatoires analysis in Chapter 5 is outstanding. Chapdelaine-Feliciati reconstructs the negotiations surrounding Article 24(3) CRC in forensic detail, revealing how proposals by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the International Planned Parenthood Federation and multiple States to make the girl child visible within the CRC were systematically deflected. The account of how Senegal’s sustained diplomatic resistance prevented explicit reference to female genital mutilation, despite support from a broad coalition, is a masterclass in the archaeology of treaty drafting, raising searching questions about consensus-based procedures and the dynamics of cultural relativism in multilateral negotiation.
Chapter 7 exemplifies the semioethic method’s constructive potential. The author resurrects a Finnish proposal from the CRC drafting process that would have decoupled majority from the end of childhood, and adapts it into a detailed proposed amendment to Article 1 CRC. Under this proposal, all children would remain protected until 18, but those reaching 15 would no longer be subject to the CRC’s paternalist provisions on the best interests of the child and parental authority, instead acquiring political and economic rights under the CEDAW and the Twin Covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The elegance of the proposal lies in its simultaneous resolution of multiple problems: the absence of a minimum age for majority; the possibility of gender-based and domicile-based disparities; and the infantilising effects of childist provisions on adolescent girls capable of rational autonomy. Equally noteworthy is Chapter 6, where Chapdelaine-Feliciati confronts the tension between prohibiting prenatal sex selection and preserving pregnant girls’ access to safe abortion. Rather than force a resolution, she declines to propose amendments, an instance of scholarly restraint that paradoxically strengthens the book’s normative authority.
The book is not without limitations. The extensive reliance on Oxford English Dictionary definitions as evidence of semantic content sits uneasily with the Peircean insight, which the author herself endorses, that meaning is constituted through interpretive practice rather than lexicographic codification. If signs derive their significance from infinite semiosis, one might question why dictionary authority should bear such analytical weight. The analysis is also confined to English-language treaty texts which is particularly problematic in this context as arguments about pronoun ordering have limited purchase in languages with different grammatical structures. Finally, the proposed treaty amendments face formidable political obstacles. A fuller engagement with the political economy of treaty reform, drawing perhaps on the tortuous history of the sole successful CRC amendment, would have enriched the prescriptive dimension.
These reservations notwithstanding, this is an important and genuinely original work. Its most enduring contribution lies in the paired reform proposals for Article 1 CRC and Article 1 CEDAW, which together offer a coherent architecture for closing the protection gap between children’s rights and women’s rights, a gap painstakingly documented through eight chapters of close textual and archival analysis. The systematisation of childism as a discriminatory structure parallel to sexism within international law, and the concept of ‘interactive intersectional discrimination’ as an advance upon standard additive models, also deserve sustained engagement from scholars of multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. Chapdelaine-Feliciati has produced a work that speaks across disciplinary boundaries, addressing international lawyers, semioticians, feminist legal theorists and child rights advocates alike, and one which demonstrates the analytical rewards of taking the language of treaties as seriously as their substance.
