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Universal Citizens, Unequal Childhoods

Children's Perspectives on Rights and Citizenship in Brazil

Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, Rio de Janeiro

Brazil's Child and Adolescent Statute, enacted in 1990, was conceived as an instrument for addressing the problems of poverty, exclusion, and violence through a legal framework. It attempts to ascribe universal, liberal-democratic citizenship to all children and adolescents. Ethnographic study of children in Rio de Janeiro reveals that different groups of children and adolescents themselves negotiate, resist, and reinterpret the citizenship rights that are ascribed to them and that the ways in which they do so are profoundly marked by class and race. These differential rights contribute to the reproduction of class-based and racial polarization in Brazilian society. At the same time, that poor children are becoming able to understand themselves as rights-bearers and that more privileged children are acquiring some level of social consciousness are potentially positive outcomes.

Key Words: Children and adolescents • Rights • Citizenship • Class • Race

Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 35, No. 4, 45-59 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X08318978


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