============================================================================ THE UN COMMITTEE WROTE ITS GUIDANCE ON CHILD JUSTICE IN 2007 AND AGAIN IN 2019. ACROSS BOTH, THE WORD BOYS APPEARS ZERO TIMES. ============================================================================ This site wrote down a weakness in its own strongest finding: it rested on one document chain, and one chain proves little about an institution. So we went and counted a second. And a third. By Mikal Monslaup with Claude (Anthropic) Kairunen on X Rickmyrolls on Reddit The reporting, the reading and the conclusions are mine. Claude did the searching, the counting, the checking and much of the drafting, and argued back when a claim was thinner than it sounded. Every figure here has a primary source you can open, because neither of us is asking to be believed. First published: 19 August 2026 (2026-08-19T18:06:00+02:00) Canonical: https://unformentoo.org/the-word-that-is-not-there.html IN SHORT ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * The Committee on the Rights of the Child issues general comments: its authoritative guidance to every state on what the Convention requires. * It has written on the child justice system twice. General comment No. 10 in 2007, and General comment No. 24 in 2019, which replaced it. * Combined length: 24,043 words. Occurrences of the word boys: 0. * Occurrences of girls: 3 in the 2007 text, 1 in the 2019 text. * On the UN's own figure, boys are 94 per cent of children detained in the administration of justice, armed conflict and national security. * GC24's discrimination paragraph names girls, children discriminated against for sexual orientation or gender identity, and children with disabilities. It does not name the 94 per cent. * The 2007 text states the Committee's reasoning plainly: girls need special attention because they are a small group and easily overlooked. That principle is sound and we do not dispute it. * Three documents now carry the same signature: A/74/136's recommendations chapter, GC10 and GC24. Girls once or three times. Boys never. * A different UN treaty body writes it routinely. General comment No. 35 (2014) on liberty and security of person names girls and boys together. So the sentence exists, is adopted and is in force. Nobody has to invent it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01. THE WEAKNESS WE WROTE DOWN This piece exists because of a sentence in our own file. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last year this site published a finding about the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty. The 804-page volume says boys often face discriminatory treatment in detention. The 23-page note sent to member states keeps the striking number and drops the finding, and its recommendations chapter uses the word girls once and the word boys not at all. A note was drafted for a lawyer alongside that article, listing what the finding does not establish. One of the items was this: it is one document chain, and one chain is strong evidence about that study and weak evidence about institutional practice until the same comparison is run elsewhere. That was the honest limit and it was written down against our own interest. This article is the attempt to close it, and the method is the same one: pick a document whose subject is fixed, count what is in it, publish whatever comes out. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02. WHAT A GENERAL COMMENT IS Not a press release. The interpretation states are measured against. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world. The Committee that oversees it issues general comments: its authoritative reading of what a provision requires in practice. They are what a government's lawyers consult, what a shadow report is written against, and what a domestic court cites when it looks for the meaning of a treaty obligation. On the child justice system the Committee has issued two. General comment No. 10 (2007), on children's rights in juvenile justice. And General comment No. 24, adopted on 18 September 2019, on children's rights in the child justice system, which replaces it. Both are sex-neutral by design and that is not a criticism. The word child appears 203 times in the first and 188 times in the second. Neither document is supposed to be about boys, and nothing here says it should be. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 03. THE COUNT Whole words, case-insensitive, from the PDFs the UN itself serves. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE COMMITTEE'S TWO GENERAL COMMENTS ON CHILD JUSTICE GC 10 (2007) · Children's rights in juvenile justice · 13,129 words · girls 3 · boys 0 GC 24 (2019) · Children's rights in the child justice system · 10,914 words · girls 1 · boys 0 · · · Combined · 24,043 words · girls 4 · boys 0 Twelve years apart, written by different memberships, one replacing the other. In neither does the word appear. For scale, here is the figure the UN transmitted to the General Assembly about the population those documents govern. "In the administration of justice and in the contexts of armed conflicts and national security, 94 per cent of all detained children are boys." -- A/74/136, paragraph 35 That figure is scoped and this site states its scope every time it uses it. In migration detention the share is 67 per cent, and in institutions 56 per cent. The 94 per cent is the justice, conflict and security setting, which is exactly the setting these two general comments are about. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 04. THE PARAGRAPH WHERE IT WOULD HAVE GONE Both documents have a passage on discrimination. Both name groups. Here they are in full. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is GC24, paragraph 40. It is the general comment's treatment of discrimination in the child justice system. "Safeguards against discrimination are needed from the earliest contact with the criminal justice system and throughout the trial, and discrimination against any group of children requires active redress. In particular, gender-sensitive attention should be paid to girls and to children who are discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Accommodation should be made for children with disabilities." -- General comment No. 24 (2019), paragraph 40 Every group named there belongs there. LGBTI children are overrepresented in child justice facilities and the Global Study says so. Children with disabilities face real barriers to a fair hearing. Girls in detention have documented distinct needs. Nothing in this article argues for removing a single word of it. The observation is what sits beside those names and what does not. The paragraph is about discrimination against groups of children in the child justice system. The group that is 94 per cent of that system, and which the UN's own study of it says often faces discriminatory treatment because of stereotypes about how violent they are, is not one of the groups named. And the 2007 text says why groups get named, in words the Committee chose itself. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 05. THE PRINCIPLE, STATED BY THE COMMITTEE This is the sentence that makes the finding a finding rather than a complaint. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Since girls in the juvenile justice system may be easily overlooked because they represent only a small group, special attention must be paid to the particular needs of the girl child." -- General comment No. 10 (2007), on the girl child in juvenile justice Read that as the Committee's reasoning rather than as a target. It is a rule about how attention works inside an institution: a small group gets overlooked, so somebody has to be told to look at it. That is correct, it is well made, and this campaign would apply it to any group it fits. It is also a rule about visibility rather than about numbers of victims, which is worth noticing, because the usual reply to everything on this site is that men are the majority and majorities do not need protecting. The Committee's own principle does not say that. It says attention has to be directed, or it goes where habit sends it. Twelve years and two documents later, the group nobody was told to look at is the one the UN's own study found facing discriminatory treatment. Being 94 per cent of a system is not the same as being seen in it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 06. THREE CHAINS, NOT ONE The limitation this article set out to close. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The original finding was one document chain. It is now three, from two different UN bodies, spanning 2007 to 2019. THE SAME SIGNATURE, THREE TIMES A/74/136 (2019), recommendations chapter, Secretary-General's note · girls 1 · boys 0 GC 10 (2007), Committee on the Rights of the Child · girls 3 · boys 0 GC 24 (2019), Committee on the Rights of the Child · girls 1 · boys 0 That is not proof of a policy and this article does not claim one. Nobody has been shown to have decided anything, and the campaign's standing rule is to describe actions and not motives. It applies here as everywhere. What three chains do is remove the easiest reply to the first one. A single document can be an editing accident. The same shape in three documents, from two bodies, twelve years apart, is a pattern in what gets written down, and a pattern is a thing an institution can be asked about. There is one more thing GC24 settles, and it settles it against the possibility of us being wrong. Our article on the Global Study rests on a test we published: that the finding stands unless some UN document after July 2019 carries the 94 per cent into a recommendation, a target or an indicator. GC24 was adopted on 18 September 2019. It is the authoritative guidance on precisely that system. It carries neither the figure nor the word. We went looking for the document that would prove us wrong, and found the one that did not. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 07. THE SENTENCE ALREADY EXISTS We ran the same count on a different treaty body, expecting the same shape. We did not get it, and this is the most useful thing in the article. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Human Rights Committee is a different UN treaty body. It oversees the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and its general comments cover the right to life, the right to a fair trial, and liberty and security of person. That last one is the article that governs detention for everybody, adults included. Its general comment on that article, number 35, was adopted in 2014. Paragraph 3 sets out who the article protects. "Article 9 guarantees those rights to everyone. “Everyone” includes, among others, girls and boys, soldiers, persons with disabilities, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, aliens, refugees and asylum seekers, stateless persons, migrant workers." -- General comment No. 35 (2014) on article 9, paragraph 3 Girls and boys. Both, named together, in a list of who a detention right protects. Written in 2014, five years before the general comment on the child justice system was adopted without the word. It is not an isolated line either. The Committee's guidance on fair trial refers to the equal right of men and women. Its guidance on the right to life has the most lopsided raw counts of anything we examined, women 14 against men 2, and almost all of that is the paragraph on abortion, which is inherently about pregnancy. Even inside that paragraph the Committee writes that states should ensure access for women and men, and especially girls and boys to sexual and reproductive health information. The symmetric formulation survives in the least symmetric subject that body writes about. HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTEE GENERAL COMMENTS, WHOLE-WORD COUNTS GC 32 (2007) · fair trial · 9,837 words · women 2 · men 1 · girls 0 · boys 0 GC 35 (2014) · liberty and security of person · 10,381 words · women 1 · men 0 · girls 1 · boys 1 GC 36 (2018) · right to life · 13,383 words · women 14 · men 2 · girls 10 · boys 1 GC 37 (2020) · peaceful assembly · 10,860 words · women 2 · men 0 · girls 0 · boys 0 So the honest conclusion is narrower than the one this article was heading towards, and better. There is no UN-wide habit of leaving boys out. One treaty body names them as a matter of routine and has done for over a decade. What the count shows is a difference between two committees writing about the same children, and the one that omitted the word was the one writing specifically about the system those children are 94 per cent of. Nobody has to invent a phrasing. The sentence is already written, already adopted, and already in force. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Committee on the Rights of the Child wrote the world's guidance on children in the justice system in 2007, and wrote it again in 2019. Between the two documents there are 24,043 words, four mentions of girls, and no mentions of boys. A different UN committee, writing in 2014 about the article that governs detention, listed who it protects and began the list with girls and boys. One of them found the word. The other was writing about the system those children are 94 per cent of. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE DOCUMENTS THIS RESTS ON ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CRC/C/GC/24 General comment No. 24 (2019) on children's rights in the child justice system https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=CRC/C/GC/24&l=en&t=pdf CRC/C/GC/10 General comment No. 10 (2007) on children's rights in juvenile justice https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=CRC/C/GC/10&l=en&t=pdf A/74/136 Global study on children deprived of liberty: note by the Secretary-General https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=A/74/136&l=en&t=pdf CCPR/C/GC/35 General comment No. 35 (2014) on article 9, liberty and security of person https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=CCPR/C/GC/35&l=en&t=pdf ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOURCE NOTES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Counts are of whole words, case-insensitively, taken from the PDFs served by documents.un.org, so boys is not counted inside other words and girls is not counted inside girlhood. Both documents extracted cleanly: child returns 203 and 188 respectively, which is the check that the text came out of the PDF properly rather than the count being an artefact of a failed extraction. * GC24 carries a note that it was reissued for technical reasons on 11 November 2019. The adoption date on its face is 18 September 2019 and that is the date used here. * The 94 per cent covers the administration of justice, armed conflict and national security. It is not a figure for all detention: migration detention is 67 per cent and institutions 56 per cent, both from the same paragraph. This site states the scope every time the figure is used. * Nine general comments were counted in total. The two on child justice are the subject here because their subject matter is fixed and comparable; the other seven are published in the research file with their counts so the selection can be checked rather than trusted. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOFTENED OR OMITTED FOR ACCURACY ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * {"wanted":"The Committee deliberately excluded boys.","published":"The word does not appear in either document.","why":"There is no evidence of a decision and we have not looked for one, because motive is not something this site claims. A count is a count. Dressing it as an intention would be unprovable and would invite the reply that we cannot read minds, which is correct."} * {"wanted":"The Committee ignored the Global Study when it wrote GC24.","published":"GC24 was adopted on 18 September 2019 and carries neither the figure nor the word.","why":"The drafting timelines overlap and we do not know them. Claiming the Committee had the study in front of it and set it aside would be an assertion about a process we have not seen."} * {"wanted":"The paragraph naming girls and LGBTI children should be narrowed.","published":"Every group named in paragraph 40 belongs there, and the article says so before it says anything else.","why":"Nothing on this site argues for less protection for anybody. The ask is a fourth name in a list of three, and if it ever reads as a subtraction it has been written wrongly."} * {"wanted":"This proves a UN-wide pattern of leaving boys out.","published":"Another UN treaty body names girls and boys together as a matter of routine.","why":"We ran the count on the Human Rights Committee expecting the same shape and got the opposite. There is no UN-wide habit here, and saying there was would be refuted by our own evidence. The finding is a difference between two committees writing about the same children, which is narrower and harder to dismiss."} ============================================================================ This document is generated from the same source data as https://unformentoo.org/the-word-that-is-not-there.html. If the two ever disagree, the page is the one that was rebuilt last; both are regenerated together. ============================================================================