The Promise of Citizenship for Brazilian Children: What Has Changed?

• DOI: 10.1177/0002716210383950
• Author: Irene Rizzini
• Date: 01 January 2011
• Published date: 01 January 2011
• Subject Matter: Articles

66 ANNALS, AAPSS, 633, January 2011

This article explores the ideas behind the promise of

citizenship to children in Brazil. The human rights of

children has become a very important issue in Brazil.

This has been especially true since the inclusion of

Article 227 in the 1988 Constitution referring to children’s

rights and the approval of the Statute on the Child and

the Adolescent in 1990, less than a year after the ratifi-

cation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights

of the Child (CRC). The article examines the changing

discourse connected to what was promised and what

the law actually accomplished. The conclusion focuses

on some of the most relevant improvements affect-

ing children’s lives and some of the remaining challenges

Brazilians face in the attempt to keep the promises made

in the Constitution and the statute.

Keywords: citizenship; children’s rights; law; imple-

mentation; public policies

Since the approval of the Statute on the Child

and the Adolescent in 1990 (Brasil 1990),

less than a year after the ratification of the

United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights

of the Child (CRC), children’s rights have

become an important issue in Brazil. Before

these events, Brazil had gone through 20 years of

The Promise

of Citizenship

for Brazilian

Children:

What Has

Changed?

By

IRENE RIZZINI

Irene Rizzini is a professor and a researcher at the

Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,

and director of the International Center for Research

on Childhood (CIESPI). She served as president of

Childwatch International Research Network from 2002

to 2009. She held the visiting chair in Brazilian cultural

studies at the Helen Kellogg Institute for International

Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2006 and

was appointed a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial

Foundation fellow in 2008. She is the author and editor

of several books, among them Disinherited from Society:

Street Children in Latin America (Editora Universitaria

Santa Ursula 1995); Children and the Law in Brazil—

Revisiting the History (1822–2000) (Editora Universitaria

Santa Ursula 2002); Globalization and Childr en (coed-

ited with Natalie Hevener Kaufman) (Kluwer Academic

2002); The Lost Century: The Historical Roots of Public

Policies on Children in Brazil (Editora Cortez 2008,

2nd ed.); The Art of Governing Children: The History

of Social Policies, Legislation and Child Welfare in Brazil

(Editora Cortez 2009, 2nd ed.).

DOI: 10.1177/0002716210383950