This handbook for journalists discusses questions around reporting on children that were raised and debated at a seminar hosted by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) South Africa and the Media Monitoring Project (MMP) in Johannesburg in 2002. One of the aims of this handbook is to promote a human rights-based approach to reporting on children. It provides an ethical framework that aims to help media balance some of the complex ethical problems about reporting children in the media. It outlines ways of navigating ethical dilemmas. The many guidelines drafted world-wide on the subject of reporting on children and children’s issues are outlined, and an analysis of the issues that inform these codes has been tailored to the South African context.

Topics include:

• children and HIV/AIDS;
• abuse and exploitation of children;
• children with disabilities;
• children and crime;
• children and the media;
• children's rights and the South African Constitution;
• the Child Justice Bill;
• the convention on the Rights of the Child.