![Sample our Health and Social Care journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5938/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Health-Social-Care.jpg"})
Abstract
In recognition of the profound benefits of children's engagement with their rights, this article presents an experiential account of how Bolivian adolescent indigenous girls discover, articulate, experience, and advocate human rights. This study explores adolescent girls' demonstrations of empowerment, agency, resistance, and solidarity as part of their initiatives within non-governmentally based human rights workshops. By featuring their voices, this study demonstrates how young Bolivian females are able to shape their own expectations and experiences of human rights. This study further emphasizes how a supportive and interactive educational introduction to the conventions, declarations, and constitutions intended to safeguard human rights can open up possibilities for comfort, self-realization, and liberation among adolescent girls amidst endemic patriarchal constraints and ongoing political and economic instability.
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge the collaboration of the Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory on the Rights of the Child and the financial support of the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Research Development Fund at the University of Ottawa, as well as the invaluable research assistance of Betsy Estevez, and the workshop-based cooperation by Ruth Mery, Elena, and Claudia. This paper is dedicated to the human rights pursuits of the Bolivian girls who participated in this project and to a resilient ‘baby girl.’
Notes
1. According to Mihr (2009), despite the extensive international and national state level reforms since the early 1990s, many governments have not adequately integrated human rights education into formal school curriculum. As a result, it has been mainly the non-governmental sectors that have led the implementation of human rights education.
2. The promotion of gender equality is exemplified in the new Bolivian constitution's 33 articles that uphold women's rights (Lanza Citation2009).
3. The name of the women's center is withheld to protect the identity of the participants.
4. Statistics indicate that Bolivian females face structural constraints in the areas of education, economics, politics, and safety. For example, Bolivia ranked 91st out of a 155 countries on the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and 78th out of 109 countries on the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) which also reveal that women's literacy rate is 86% compared to men's at 96%; and that women comprised only 40% of the professional labor force and only 24% of government ministerial positions in 2008 (UNDP 2009, pp. 182, 187). Furthermore, only 68% of indigenous girls complete primary school compared to 86% of non-indigenous girls and boys and to 79% of indigenous boys (United Nations (UN) 2010, p. 137). Furthermore, according to official figures on reported violence, over 50% of Bolivian women generally and over 60% of indigenous women in particular are survivors of some form of violence (physical, psychological, and sexual) by either current or former partners (Servicio de Noticias de la Mujer de Latinoamérica y el Caribe (SEMlac) 2009, Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) 2010).
5. The girls' own experiences with violence are shared below.
6. This study is part of a broader research project that explores women's and girls' engagement with human rights in Bolivia, Honduras, and Nicaragua in which there are over 477 female participants (see Gervais 2010).
7. The workshops were established by the women's center and not by the research team. I became aware of these workshops through my involvement with education projects for imprisoned children and indigenous women in the same city in Bolivia. As I observed the life-changing potential of the workshops, I obtained permission from the project facilitators to explore them in greater depth through an official study funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Research Development Fund and approved by the Research Ethics Board at the at the University of Ottawa.
8. The community center was founded in the early 1980s and it provides skills training, educational, psychological, and legal assistance and daycare services for women, youth, and children. It is one of three major NGOs that address women's issues in Cochabamba. While this center offers mainly education-based programs, the others focus on labor issues and legal aid, respectively. All three women's centers collaborate through a women's network in Cochabamba and the legal aid office also hosts a radio program that supports the network and complements the work of the three women's centers by creating awareness on women's rights and the prevention of violence against women.
9. According to Articles 12 and 29 of the CRC (UNHCR 1989).
10. The term ‘expert-dominated’ is drawn from Cunningham and Mathie's (2009) critique against Western states’, researchers’, and practitioners’ presumed ‘expertise’ and their related assumptions of the incapacity of people in developing contexts to think and act on their own initiative. It is adapted here to the context of children's rights in recognition of their potential of agency and activism.
11. In particular, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20 November 1989, [hereinafter CRC] and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948 [hereinafter UDHR].
12. Since human rights are inherent, the term ‘discovery’ is invoked here to convey the process of ‘finding out’ about one's rights.
13. While the positive potential is being emphasized here, it is understood that the pursuit of human rights and the path to empowerment is often filled with struggles and set-backs.
14. While I invoke the human security agenda as an analytical lens in this paper, I am mindful of the framework's limiting tendency to overemphasize ‘individualized’ security. For more on the importance of re-balancing the human security agenda in light of structural considerations see Denov (2006).
15. In this study, the participants were between the ages of 13 and 17 and while they are adolescents, they are considered children as defined under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. According to Article 1 of the Convention, a child is defined as ‘every human being below the age of eighteen years’ (UNHCR 1989).
16. The majority of the girls' families previously lived as indigenous peasant farmers in remote mountainous regions and moved to Cochabamba to overcome abject poverty and to gain access to basic resources such as water, education, and health care.
17. These circumstances are also related to the structural constraints emphasized in note 4.
18. The first questionnaires and focus group sessions were administered when the workshops were already underway. Therefore an objective assessment of the transformational effects is limited in this study because there is no comparison of the girls' understanding of human rights before and after the workshops.
19. All workshop attendees were invited to participate in the study. All research participants provided voluntary consent which included parental authorization.
20. This study did not engage in a full SAS2 methodology but it integrated elements of it (see note 24).
21. The concepts are drawn from Denov and Gervais’ (2007) article that explores the agency, negotiation, resourcefulness, and resistance exhibited by war-affected girls in Sierra Leone.
22. The Canadian research team was comprised of the author and her research assistant.
23. The author and her research assistant led the study and managed the administration of the questionnaires and focus group sessions. The workshop coordinators and three participants were trained as a local research team in order to ensure that the research was undertaken as inclusively as possible and to provide further empowering and learning opportunities for the young women. Communication (in person, by email, and phone) prior to, during and after the on site data collection facilitated the training and additional clarification for translation and contextual information on the workshops and the participants. Critical reflections on potential biases for both Canadian and Bolivian research team members were undertaken to maximize the objectivity of the data collection and analysis.
24. The ‘doing it socially’ approach is part of Chevalier and Buckles’ (2008) SAS2 methodology that guides collaborative inquiry and multi-stakeholder dialogue that co-generates practical and authentic ‘living knowledge’ through ‘social’ interaction in order to advance ‘social’ change.
25. The creative expression activities included songs, story-telling, humor, and exercises.
26. Based on our ethical responsibilities as researchers and out of concern for the well-being of the participants, the research team ensured that debriefing opportunities and professional psychological support were made available to the participants to help them cope with their experiences of violence.
27. Formal definitions of the different forms of violence are not provided here because the girls' own conceptions of them were explored in the research instead.
28. Bearing in mind the study's limitations identified in notes 18, 38–40, and recognizing that the workshops cannot be credited with all the life changes that the girls reported, it is still important to note that the impacts highlighted below were measured by assessments that were undertaken at the end of each 7 months series of workshops on an annual basis over 3 years. Given that by the end of the study, the girls had participated in the workshops for 3 years, their ability to reflect upon and assess their own changes and challenges had developed relatively well. Thus, while their self-reported progress is potentially prone to selected concealment, revision, or exaggeration, given their maturation and development within and parallel to the workshops and given the research team's comprehensive guidance regarding ethics and its ongoing efforts to build relationships of trust and inclusiveness, the girls' own reflections of their evolving circumstances can be considered authentic and reliable.
29. In addition to their oral and written statements, many participants expressed their enthusiasm about their new-found knowledge of the Bolivian constitution through their body language (e.g. smiles and emphatic gestures) during the focus group sessions.
30. The enthusiasm related to the constitution coincided with Bolivia's constitutional reform that took place at the same time the workshops were given between 2006 and 2008.
31. This claim does not imply that the girls were against human rights before they participated in the workshops; rather, it recognizes the changes they experienced once they became aware of their rights.
32. While self-respect and respect for others were indicative of the participants' progression towards empowerment, they also serve as examples of ‘actions’ that the girls are taking in pursuit of their rights.
33. The confrontational meaning of resistance is not invoked here because the girls in this study were not involved in aggressive individual conflicts or militant resistance movements.
34. The girls reported problems with dynamism and disrespect only in 2008 and not in 2006 and 2007.
35. Since Bolivia is considered to be the most impoverished country in South America, the Bolivian population continues to struggle against political instability and extreme poverty.
36. In early 2010, at the start of his second term as President of Bolivia, Evo Morales established a Cabinet that consisted of an equal number of women and men – an unprecedented example of gender parity in Bolivian politics and one that is indicative of attempts at structural change.
37. To ensure that preventative programs are fully comprehensive and effective, it is imperative that boys also be encouraged to participate in human rights and pro-gender equality workshops. See Gervais’ (forthcoming) exploration of the potential of such initiatives.
38. The examples illustrated in this article do not capture the totality of the girls' complex experiences related to learning about, and acting upon human rights and gender equality.
39. This study only sheds light on changes in attitudes and actions in the immediate aftermath of the girls' acquisition of new knowledge.
40. This study's lack of tracking of pre-workshop attitudes among the girls limits the accuracy of the assessment of the actual impact of the informal education.
41. While this point recognizes the methodological limitations of self-report data, it is not dismissing the relevance of children's voices.
42. Struggles may include surrounding individual and structural resistance to change that the girls may encounter among relatives, peers, neighbours, co-workers, politicians, and policy-makers.