The Status of the Girl Child under International Law
A Semioethic Analysis

This is the first comprehensive study of the girl child under international law and through legal semiotics.

Clara Chapdelaine-Feliciati (Author)

9781316512784, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 March 2025

322 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.6 cm, 0.585 kg

'Drawing on Lady Welby's Meaning Triad, Chapdelaine-Feliciati demonstrates how seemingly neutral legal language can enable interpretive discretion that undermines treaty intentions, allowing harmful practices such as child marriage, female genital mutilation, and the exploitation of child influencers to persist. The author moves beyond a purely semiotic framework by introducing a semioethic approach, emphasizing ethical responsibility in legal interpretation … While proposing amendments to address this invisibility, the author also recognizes competing rights and cautions against reforms that could unintentionally harm girls' autonomy … The work represents a significant contribution to international human rights scholarship and the advancement of girls' rights.' Frésange Maleka, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Clara Chapdelaine-Feliciati offers the first comprehensive study of the status of the girl child under international law. This book significantly contributes to bridging two fields usually studied separately: law and semiotics. The author engages in the novel legal semiotics theory to decode the meaning of international treaties (mainly the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and International Covenants) and assess whether the provisions, as formulated, clearly identify the girl child and take into account the obstacles she faces as a result of sexism, childism, and intersectional discrimination. This is also the first book to apply The Significs Meaning Triad – Sense, Meaning, Significance – in international law, and Semioethics for both a diagnosis and prognosis of problematic signs in view of modifying the wording of relevant treaties.

Introduction
1. Semiotics and Semioethics
2. Definition of the Girl Child
3. Sexism and Childism
4. Intersectional Identity of the Girl Child
5. Identification of the Girl Child in the Convention on the Rights of the Child
6. The Beginning of Girlhood under International Law
7. The End of Girlhood under International Law
8. Girlhood and Womanhood in the CEDAW.

Subject Areas: Family law [LNM]