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Building Human Rights Consciousness In Postconflict Societies: Peruvian Adolescents’ Understandings Of Human Rights, Gabriel Velez

College of Education Faculty Research and Publications

During adolescence, individuals begin to form ideas about human rights as part of the development of a sense of self. The outcomes of these processes are influential in the stability and peace in postconflict societies. However, there remain many questions about how these youth construct ideas about human rights and how they become oriented toward promoting these in society through a developed human rights consciousness. This study investigates how adolescents in an underexplored area of postconflict societies—where past violence was not intimately experienced—understand human rights. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 25 fifteen-year-olds across five schools in Tacna, Peru. These adolescents …