Members of the Media Council showed more recognition of the importance of children’s participation in the media than did the Broadcasting Commission. The Media Council has been involved in setting up Media Clubs in schools across the country to provide children with platforms in which they can discuss social and political issues that affect their lives. The purpose of these clubs is to encourage children’s participation as active citizens fully engaged in the Maldivian democracy. Members of the Media Clubs would discuss issues of concern to them, prepare papers and articles on those issues, and would directly lobby parliamentarians and other political and social leaders in the country in order to ensure their views and opinions are represented and included in decisionmaking processes at the local and national levels. These activities by the Media Council, however, are not receiving adequate support from other institutions involved in the process, or from the society in general. The Education Ministry, for example, is reluctant to allow the Media Council to allow Media Clubs to become fora for political debate and discussions. Their rationale is that introduction of political issues will be damaging to the children. These ‘allegations’ against the Education Ministry by the Media Council is not without foundation as suggested by findings from the children’s focus groups where children expressed unhappiness about how strictly schools regulate their participation in political discussions and activities inside and outside of the classroom. The Media Council feels that the Education Ministry is exerting too much control over what sort of activities the Council can and cannot engage the children in. If there is to be discussion among students on issues related to democracy and other social and political affairs, the Education Ministry wants to be the only authority with the power to dictate the content and shape of such discussions. There is resistance from the Education Ministry, for example, to the Media Council’s proposition that the clubs be named ‘Media and Democracy Clubs.’ This is a resistance and attitude shared by Parent Teacher Associations as well, according to the consultative discussions with the Media Council. What drives this attitude is a widespread belief among parents, teachers and society in general that democracy itself is about dirty partisan politics—something from which, were it true, they would understandably want to protect their children from. The Media Council is also of the opinion that instead of working together towards the common goal of fostering children’s participation in the media, various stakeholders are overprotective of their own mandates as well as their allocated budgets. As an exposition of this proposition, members of the Media Council provided the following scenario: If the Human Rights Commission, for instance, has the mandate to ensure that children’s rights are protected; and they have a particular budget to spend on implementing various projects towards realisation of children’s rights, it would make sense for the Human Rights Commission to allocate their designated budget for the realisation of children’s rights to participation in the media to a body such as the Media Council. This would ensure that the Human Rights Commission gets a competent body to carry out the necessary work, and that their task of ensuring children’s rights was adequately carried out. 24