The responsible Action of Children beyond the Rights and Duties of Citizenship

Abstract

Responsibility has become a key concept in the balance between the rights and duties of children's citizenship. If, traditionally, children were not considered as subjects of rights, nowadays, more than to recognize them as such, governments are also asserting their duties. This paper aims to discuss and to question the notion of responsibility understood as a fulfillment of individual universal duties/obligations and its attributes, and presents the responsible action from a relational perspective as a way of contemplating the exercise of children's citizenship in their daily lives. To this end, the article presents the results from a field work undertaken with 11 and 12 year old children living in a community in the city of Rio de Janeiro, about their understanding of the responsibility and the dramatization of scenes in which they stage situations involving this notion. The results problematize the discourse of responsibility as an idea of individual obligation and reveal that the scenarios performed by the children contemplate moral dilemmas and relations of interdependence more complex than the ones that the rhetorical discourse points out.