Young adolescents’ positioning of human rights: Findings from Colombia,Northern Ireland,Republic of Ireland and the United States

Abstract

This study investigated how young adolescents thought about the location of human rights issues and the nature of violations in differing geographic regions. Open-ended, task-based interviews were conducted with 116 students in Colombia, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the United States. Although students in each location pointed to a combination of global, national, and local human rights issues, as well as those found in nations distant from their own, the salience of these varied by setting. Variations were consistent with the contexts in which students had learned about human rights; these included personal experience, school instruction, and broader national discourses. This research indicates that students’ understanding of human rights is influenced by a variety of contextual factors, and it suggests that educators may want to consider how they can complement the messages and experiences students encounter in settings outside school.

A lot of times, places like Saudi Arabia and a lot of Middle Eastern countries, the women aren’t allowed to vote, so I think it’s also a change of culture to that they need to recognize that women are half the population of the country, and that their rights are just as important as men’s. (Anna, United States)

Certain festivals that would happen in Ireland would be St. Patrick’s Day or the 12th [of July], and in past years there’s been a lot of trouble, and I think that just once again maybe people need to learn to get along together and not having to make such a statement, and just like celebrate peacefully. (Chevonne, Northern Ireland)

If in school we have a group project, I have to work with people that live in my sector. If I were assigned to work with [my other friends], I can’t go to where they live for the simple fact that I’m not from that sector. So, our rights are being violated in a totally fundamental way. For example, we can’t go to the new library, because it is in the area where they live and it is impossible to pass there. (Gimena, Colombia)

Each of these girls has studied human rights at school, and each considers the topic important. However, they talk about the nature and location of human rights very differently. Anna focuses on the cultural basis of political discrimination faced by women on the other side of the globe. Chevonne emphasizes personal attitudes and their link to community violence in her own country. And Gimena is keenly aware of the role of drug traffickers in violating her own right to travel freely in her neighborhood.

During interviews, these were the most common ways that adolescents in the United States, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Colombia positioned the topic of human rights. Some saw human rights affecting themselves directly, in local and immediate ways; for others, human rights were an important national issue that had potential personal implications; and for still others, human rights involved issues that were more distant, and which primarily affected those in less developed countries. Although all three responses could be found among students in each of the four countries, clear patterns arose that point to how students’ ideas relate to differing personal experiences, curricular emphases, and national discourses.

Background

Human rights education is widely advocated by scholars, governmental agencies, and various national and international organizations, many of which have developed supporting curriculum materials (Council of Europe, 2009; Osler, 2008; Starkey, 1991; Waldron and Ruane, 2010). The General Assembly of the United Nations has recently reaffirmed that human rights education is itself a right and that member states are duty-bound to ensure that education within each nation strengthens respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms (United Nations, 2011). Regional, national and local efforts to implement human rights education in schools and other settings have flourished over the past two decades (Meyer et al., 2010; Suárez, 2008; United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, 2005).

The importance of human rights education derives, at least in part, from its role in preparing students for civic life. As Starkey (2010) notes, the principles and practices of human rights provide a concrete means of analyzing, naming and addressing violations of human freedom and dignity; consideration of human rights thus plays a crucial role in helping students evaluate policies related to a wide range of contemporary social concerns, including globalization, migration, genocide, warfare, security, economic development, sustainability and the expansion of human potential. Starkey (2010) further argues that because human rights instruments and procedures provide such a strong moral and political foundation for addressing discrimination and abuses of human dignity, learning about them encourages citizens to ‘see beyond local and national solidarities and provides a standard against which the programmes and actions of governments and other powerful agencies including businesses and religious movements can be judged’ (Starkey, 2010: 39). By identifying principles that transcend national legislation or specific cultural values, Osler (2008) notes that human rights provide a framework within which people can acknowledge and protect the rights of others throughout the world; the norms and practices of protecting human rights have thus come to constitute the ‘common moral language’ of global society (Beitz, 2009: 10). The importance of human rights for civic education, then, derives from both their universality and their scope of application.

Contested ideas about human rights and human rights education

Despite their wide scope and appeal to universality, the application of human rights to differing regions and circumstances is contested. Civil and political rights are so well established in national and international law that they are sometimes known as ‘first-generation’ rights. Economic, social, and cultural rights (‘second generation’ rights), however, command less widespread acceptance. Although rights from both categories are enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, their relative importance was a major point of discord during its drafting, and nations continue to differ greatly in the relative extent to which they address civil/political and economic/social/cultural rights in national policy (Glendon, 2002). Ratification of international human rights treaties, in fact, is often accompanied by exemptions in which governments excuse themselves from the duty to provide particular rights. In addition, official government statements and national political discourses are more likely to identify human rights issues in enemy or competitor nations than those that exist domestically or among allies. A seemingly universal consensus about the importance of human rights, then, masks disagreement over what constitutes a human right and in what settings such rights apply.

The field of human rights education is beset by a similar tension between widespread recognition of its importance and lack of consensus over its meaning. Human rights educators frequently disagree over the purpose, pedagogy, and curricular content of human rights education (Magendzo, 1997; Suárez, 2007a), and a great deal of scholarship has been devoted to outlining these differing perspectives (e.g., Bajaj, 2011; Flowers, 2004; Tibbitts, 2002). Many of these disagreements revolve around the object of study in human rights education: Should students examine international human rights documents and issues? Should they be empowered to address issues in their own communities? Or should they develop rights-based skills and dispositions as a basis for civic participation and interpersonal relations? Although these perspectives overlap, they are not identical, and differing assumptions lead to differing emphases. Some programs, that is, may emphasize international dimensions of the topic, while others focus on national, local or personal issues.

Empirical research on human rights education

We know little about how differing emphases in either educational programs or national discourses affect students’ understanding of human rights. A large part of the empirical research in this area has focused on the nature and extent of the intended curriculum (particularly in textbooks and official documents), either within or across nations (e.g., Cardenas, 2005; Inter-American Institute of Human Rights, 2003; Meyer et al., 2010; Russell and Tiplic, 2014; Suárez, 2007a, 2007b). Other international research has consisted of case studies of the implemented curriculum at local levels, including studies of teachers’ understanding of the topic (e.g., Bajaj, 2011, in India; Gaudelli and Fernekes, 2004, in the United States; Ruane et al., 2010, in the Republic of Ireland). Still other studies have demonstrated that specific programs that are wholly or partly based on teaching about human rights principles and their application lead to some combination of greater knowledge, improved self-concept, heightened concern for equality and the rights of others, and a willingness to take action to support human rights (Avery et al., 1992, Gaudelli and Fernekes, 2004, and Wade, 1994, in the United States; Bajaj, 2004, in the Dominican Republic; Bajaj, 2010, in India; Covell and Howe, 1999, and Covell et al., 2010, in Canada).

Students’ ideas about society and civic participation, however, result from their active engagement with a variety of influences that include not only formal educational programs but also peers, family, and wider social, cultural, and political contexts (Barton and Avery, 2015; Torney-Purta et al., 1999). Human rights education programs themselves are influenced not only by philosophical or pedagogical principles but also by social and pragmatic considerations that vary by context – political and historical legacies, cultural patterns, funding and training opportunities, and administrative decisions about curricular placement. Students’ ideas about human rights, then, may vary depending on the particular approach – and its local implementation – that they have experienced, as well as on their personal and community experiences with human rights and broader public discourses about such issues.

Previous research on these influences is suggestive but incomplete. The International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) of students in 38 countries found that although 68% of students correctly answered an item about the purpose of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the percentage answering correctly across nations ranged from 38% (in the Dominican Republic) to 92% (in the Republic of Korea) (Schulz et al., 2010). Analyzing data from the earlier IEA Civic Education Study of students in 27 countries, Torney-Purta et al. (2008) found that students were more likely to know the purpose of the UDHR if they lived in countries with lower levels of political freedom, and more likely to know the purpose of the Convention on the Rights of the Child if they lived in countries in which the national government focused on human rights in education-related intergovernmental dialogue. A survey in Northern Ireland (Niens et al., 2006), meanwhile, found that students possessed an extremely low level of knowledge of what constituted human rights or of who was responsible for protecting those rights locally; that study also found that students’ knowledge of, and support for, human rights varied depending on their religious/political community.

A few site-specific qualitative studies also have illustrated the context-dependent nature of students’ thinking. In Tamal Nadu, India, Bajaj (2010) found that a number of factors at home, in school, and in the wider community affected students’ enthusiasm toward acting on what they had learned about human rights in school. Students who encountered rigid hierarchies related to gender, caste, or socioeconomic status, for example, had trouble effectively seeking action to address the violations they saw or had experienced themselves. In a classroom study with younger students in the United States, Wade (1994) also found that students’ ideas about rights often intersected with knowledge and experience gained outside school, and that students whose ideas were more elaborated were those who had learned about violations in other contexts.

Although these studies suggest that students’ understanding of human rights is influenced by contextual factors – including personal, community, classroom, and national settings – we still know little about the precise nature of this influence. International surveys show that students’ knowledge of human rights varies, for example, but they provide little information on the nature of students’ thinking across (or within) nations. In-depth, qualitative studies such as those by Bajaj and Wade illustrate students’ reasoning in more detail, but each of these is limited to a single geographical setting. Comparative, international research that explores the nature of students’ thinking thus provides an important opportunity to understand how a variety of factors influence students’ understanding of human rights.

Insight into students’ thinking about the location of human rights issues, and about the rights that they consider the most important in those locations, is an important element of such research. Human rights are defined by their universality; but, as noted earlier, their applicability in given settings is often disputed or deemphasized. To what extent, then, do students see human rights as operating at local, national, or international levels, and which rights do they consider most salient in different locations? Answering these questions not only contributes to academic knowledge of students’ thinking about society but also has the potential to provide instructional guidance for teachers. As Hahn (2005) notes, teaching about human rights depends upon having a sense of the ideas that students bring with them. Empirical research on students’ thinking – and its contextual influences – thus provides the basis for designing more responsive instructional programs.

Methods

This study examined contextual influences on students’ understanding of human rights through interviews with 116 young adolescents (ages 14–17), who attended schools in eight settings in four countries (Colombia, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, and the United States). These settings were characterized by very different human rights experiences, including diverse national discourses, school curricula, and students’ own encounters with human rights. Interviewing students in such different settings provides an opportunity to explore the central concern of this research: how societal contexts influence young people’s thinking about human rights. (Teachers at each site also were interviewed in order to provide background information on the settings, but interviews were not systematically analyzed as data for this study.) This design does not, however, permit generalization to national or even regional populations, because each of the schools represents a unique configuration of influences. Although many comparative studies attempt to isolate factors in order to determine their relative importance, a study such as this aims instead to illustrate how multiple influences combine to shape students’ understanding in each setting.

Sampling and sites

Selection of sites for this research was both purposeful and based on personal contacts. Because not all students, in all settings, learn about human rights in a systematic way (either in school or out), sites were purposely identified to include teachers who devoted attention to the topic. In the United States, the principal investigators identified teachers whom they knew taught elective courses on human rights; in Colombia, Ireland and Northern Ireland the principal investigators contacted educators whom they knew were involved in teacher education or curriculum projects related to human rights and asked them to nominate teachers actively involved in such teaching. Those who agreed to take part were asked to give their students the opportunity to participate in interviews, contingent on parental permission and students’ own assent. These sampling procedures provided accessible participants who were conversant with the topic of human rights, but as noted previously, they do not permit generalization of the content of students’ ideas to wider national populations.

The four countries differ in important ways. All are electoral democracies with constitutional protections for civil and political rights, but the effectiveness of these protections varies. The Republic of Ireland and the United States have long traditions of stable democratic government, domestic peace and effective law enforcement and judicial systems. Although the United Kingdom’s protections of civil and political liberties also apply to residents of Northern Ireland, the history of conflict between Unionist and Nationalist communities there (and between each of these communities and the British government) has resulted in numerous allegations of historical and ongoing violations of civil and political rights, particularly those related to personal security, and these are part of the everyday lives of many children (Emerson and Lundy, 2013). Colombia, meanwhile, has been the site of long-standing internal violence involving left-wing guerillas, right-wing paramilitaries, drug cartels, and the military, along with corruption in law enforcement and the judiciary, and these factors have led to frequent and systematic violations of human rights. Colombia also has higher income inequality, and a much higher proportion of the population living in poverty, than the other three countries (Central Intelligence Agency, 2014a, 2014b; Freedom House, 2013).

Discourses regarding human rights also vary among the four countries. In Colombia, violence and economic deprivation are widely addressed in the media and political discussions (Gallón, 2007; Gómez, 2009; Kirk, 2009), and public policies there are frequently either justified or criticized by reference to human rights – although the government, military, and nongovernmental organizations and human rights activists often have very different perspectives on the implications of human rights (Tate, 2007). In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement mandated creation of a human rights commission, and the language of human rights and practices associated with protecting them have become increasingly prevalent as a way of addressing issues stemming from the community conflict, even though the application of such perspectives has been incomplete and sometimes partisan (Beirne and Ní Aoláin, 2009; Jarman, 2009; Mageen and O’Brien, 1999). Human rights also have a high profile in the Republic of Ireland, and Irish leaders have held positions as both the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The Republic of Ireland is widely recognized for its commitment to human rights in foreign policy (Collier, 2003) and, domestically, human rights are promoted by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and numerous civil society organizations (Equality and Rights Alliance, 2014; Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, 2014).

Among these four countries, explicit attention to human rights may have the lowest profile in the United States, where US constitutional protections are more widely discussed (and struggled over) than human rights, and where economic issues are rarely included within a framework of rights (Hope, 2008; Libal and Hertel, 2011; Powell, 2008). The United States is the only country in this study without a U.N.-accredited national Human Rights Commission (International Coordinating Committee of the National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, 2013), and to the extent that human rights features in public discourse in the United States, it is usually associated with instances of oppression or political violence in other countries.

Participants

The US sample included 53 students (34 girls and 19 boys) in two public secondary schools, both in middle class neighborhoods located in major metropolitan areas, one on the East Coast, the other in the Mountain West region. Although most students were White, the sample included several who identified themselves as members of other ethnic groups or immigrants to the United States (from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe). In both schools, students were enrolled in elective courses (taught each day for 1–2 semesters) that included a principle focus on human rights. These courses emphasized conceptual understanding of human rights documents and of global and domestic human rights issues; those in the Mountain West school also participated in a program designed to identify a human rights issue in their community and develop a policy plan for local leaders to use in addressing it.

The Northern Ireland sample included 20 students (13 girls, 7 boys), from two schools in urban areas. One was a ‘Maintained’ (primarily Catholic) school, the other a ‘Controlled’ (primarily Protestant) school. Both were selective schools that enroll students who place in approximately the top 30% of entrance criteria, and most families are middle class or above. Because of the schools’ locations and enrollment patterns, few of these students would have had direct experience with political violence or other extreme aspects of the region’s conflict, although all would be familiar with these through the media and popular culture. No students identified themselves as members of ethnic minorities. In both schools, human rights education was included as part of the required citizenship curriculum, which is typically taught for an average of approximately 30 minutes per week. Although human rights as a specific topic constituted only a portion of the time given to the subject, teachers at both schools spoke of it as a thread running throughout the citizenship curriculum. In both schools, students learned about topics such as self-identity, the challenges and benefits of diversity, and social issues such as poverty and equality, with an emphasis on developing a sense of personal responsibility for human rights in everyday life.

In the Republic of Ireland, the sample included 18 students (12 girls and 6 boys), at two very different schools in Dublin – one a Catholic, girls’ grammar (selective) school, the other a co-educational, comprehensive (nonselective), multidenominational school. Students came from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, but most were middle class or above. All students were enrolled in a required Civic, Social and Political Education Course, which met for 40 minutes each week and covered a wide range of citizenship-related topics such as democracy, rights and responsibilities, interdependence, development, environmental stewardship, human dignity and law. As in Northern Ireland, teachers at both schools described human rights as a thread that ran throughout and unified the course, as well as a topic of specific attention within it.

The sample in Colombia included 25 students (15 girls and 10 boys) from two different settings in or near one of the country’s largest cities. Nine came from an elite private school in an affluent area of the city, while 16 came from a combination of three public schools in areas of violence, high poverty and control by guerillas, paramilitaries or drug traffickers. All were of Colombian origin, and one girl was of Afro-Colombian heritage. None of their schools had specific citizenship classes, but students in the public schools had participated in a special program (like the one in the US Mountain West) that involved identifying a local human rights issue and proposing public policy solutions; those in the private school participated in a model United Nations project that also included attention to human rights issues.

Instrument

Students participated in open-ended, semi-structured, task-based interviews (see Appendix 1), conducted by members of the research team, including a native speaker of Spanish who conducted interviews in Colombia. Interviews began by giving students a set of 16 captioned images, each listing one of the rights outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (see Appendix 2). Students were asked to imagine that they were teachers constructing a bulletin board on the topic but did not have enough space to include all the images, and to select the four they felt would best communicate the idea of human rights. This set of images included both civil and political rights and economic, social, and cultural rights. The images that accompanied each caption were chosen to reflect circumstances that might suggest a mixture of more and less economically developed countries, as well as those that were ambiguous. They also included images of individuals who appeared to be from a range of ethnic backgrounds.

Giving students this kind of concrete, image-based task serves a number of purposes. It encourages students to talk about rights using their own conceptual categories, instead of limiting them to choices based on predetermined categories of analysis. Visual images also can elicit ideas that students have little experience talking about, and the content of the materials provide a reference point throughout the interview (as both interviewer and students refer back to the rights identified in them). Finally, the completion of an easy but thought-provoking task can serve as a warm-up that makes students feel more comfortable when responding to later, more abstract questions (Levstik and Barton, 2008). The structured nature of the task and interview nonetheless limits the range of possible responses, and thus the data it generates provide only one source of information on students’ thinking.

After students worked together to select four representative images, they were asked to explain why they included each. This was followed by a series of other questions that asked what they thought could be done to ensure that more people were able to enjoy these rights; which rights they thought were the ‘biggest issue around here’ (stated in a deliberately ambiguous way); which rights they thought they could personally have the greatest impact on; what to do when rights appear to come into conflict (with specific examples chosen to reflect national contexts); whether they thought everyone had the same perspective on human rights; and whether they thought it was important to study human rights in schools. Most interviews lasted approximately 25–30 minutes.

In order to promote conversation, we interviewed all students in groups of at least two (although practical circumstances often meant that groups consisted of three, four or even more students). Group settings give students a chance to respond to each other’s ideas, and this often leads to more natural conversation and greater elaboration than individual interviews. In addition, group settings can promote a greater sense of comfort on the part of students and thereby decrease the feeling of being ‘examined’ that may accompany individual interviews.

Data analysis

These interviews resulted in data on a number of aspects of students’ thinking, but this analysis focuses on just two related elements of their ideas: (1) Where they thought human rights were an issue, and (2) the nature of the issues they perceived in those locations. Locations were inductively derived from the overall set of responses: local settings (students’ schools or neighborhoods); students’ own nation (including their local city); distant nations; and the globe (without reference to a single location). Students’ answers to all questions were coded as belonging to one or more of these categories, although responses to questions in which they were specifically asked to talk about a particular location – such as, ‘Which are the most important rights around here?’ – were analyzed separately from those in which they spontaneously identified locations. Types of rights were coded as belonging to one of two a priori categories: civil and political rights or social, economic and cultural rights.

This analysis revealed several common patterns in students’ thinking within each setting. The following section identifies these patterns, including variations within and across nations, and illustrates them with excerpts from interviews that demonstrate the nature of students’ descriptions and reasoning. Rather than reporting the portion of students who responded in given ways, these findings identify the portion of responses (that is, of the total number of statements identifying a location) that fell within each category. This procedure is more appropriate for group interviews such as those in this research, because students often accept each other’s ideas without comment, and thus it is not always possible to differentiate the discrete ideas of different respondents.

The primary purpose of this analysis is to identify trends that existed within each setting. Although this also provides the basis for general comparison of settings, the differing sample sizes and rates of student self-selection in these settings, as well as interview conditions and procedures that differed somewhat across nations, prevent the kind of quantitative precision that is possible with more structured instruments.

Findings

Sometimes students talked about human rights issues in global terms; that is, they did not point to any specific location, and they implied that such issues were common throughout the world. In Northern Ireland, for example, Rhiannon noted, ‘You see people every day, there’s people being killed, and people not getting education, and people making opinions based on like race or sex for jobs and everything’. Similarly, Irish student Aoife observed,

It seems like very basic things a lot of people around the world don’t have—adequate living standards, and food, and cloth, and housing, and medical care, and they’re really important issues that need to be highlighted, because a lot of people are suffering from not having those things.

And Colombian student Valeria explained,

There are lots of parts of the world where people are discriminated against because they are Black and others are White, or people are different in some way. It happens a lot. It’s one that is violated a lot these days. ¹

Most often, however, students identified particular countries or regions – or types of countries or regions – that exemplified human rights issues, and especially the violation of rights. These responses fell into three distinct categories: (1) countries distant from students’ own; (2) students’ own countries; and (3) students’ local neighborhoods. Although a range of answers was evident in each country, the frequency and salience of these categories differed across national contexts.

Distant countries

Except when directly asked about their own countries, a large portion of responses in the United States and the Republic of Ireland (about 80% in each setting) positioned human rights as issues that existed in other parts of the world, particularly in regions that differed significantly from the students’ countries in terms of culture, politics, or the economy. In contrast, in Northern Ireland, only a little over half of responses pointed to such countries, and in Colombia, only about 15% did so.

Often, students pointed to unspecified and undifferentiated countries that they perceived as experiencing problems with each category of human rights. US student Paul, for example, noted,

I think in the United States we have an ideal system, I think our judicial system is something that should be modeled after, but I feel that in – I can’t give you the names of the countries, but I know that in a lot of countries – some – a judicial system doesn’t even exist and in the places that they do exist they’re not solid.

Similarly, US student Abby said, ‘I think that a lot of countries suppress people’s right to education so they can maintain power over them’. In Ireland, Fiona noted,

To vote, in a lot of countries it’s only rich people and wealthy people, and people that have houses get to vote, and a lot of the poorer people don’t get a vote, or women don’t get a vote, or other nationalities, people that are like seen as worse than other people don’t get a vote.

And in Northern Ireland, Matthew suggested, ‘Regions which have gone through quite a lot of war and turmoil, they’re more likely to disregard human rights’.

Other times, students pointed to human rights issues in particular types of countries: those that were politically oppressive, less economically developed, or that they referred to as part of the ‘Third World’. US student Katrina noted,

As Americans, we take it for granted we can have an opinion, we can vote…and have an opinion on a candidate, but in developing nations and countries where there are human rights violations, they don’t have that opportunity, they’re judged for it, or they are just not allowed to, arrested, beaten.

US student Abby noted, ‘There’s pretty much an ancient culture barrier for some of these religions in Third World countries because women are thought of as second class citizens, and, they’re not given the same opportunities as men’. Irish student Aoife noted,

It seems like very basic things, a lot of people around the world, don’t have adequate living standards, and, food, and clothing, and housing and medical care and they’re really important issues that need to be highlighted, because a lot of people are suffering from not having those things.

Similarly, US student Eve pointed to the importance of an adequate standard of living and explained, ‘I just think that if a person is ever going to develop, like say they’re living in the developing world, to get out of poverty they have to get an adequate living standard’.

Often, students noted particular regions of the world (and sometimes specific countries) when discussing human rights issues. One of the most frequently identified regions was the Middle East, which was especially associated with violations of civil and political rights, particularly for women. Irish student Alethea, for example, observed that in Afghanistan, ‘They have like completely different views, they think that – I mean especially for women – they think that they shouldn’t be allowed a lot of things’. In Northern Ireland, Caine noted,

Middle Eastern countries, women aren’t allowed outside without wearing the full – I’m not quite sure what it’s called, but it’s the full, sort of thing – and I think that if they were told that they actually have a right to go outside wearing whatever they want, and to do whatever they want, it would be better.

Such responses were especially common in the United States, where over one-tenth of responses pointed to human rights violations in the Middle East or Islamic countries. Students often positioned these violations in contrast to practices in the United States and Europe. Camilla, for example, noted,

In some Middle Eastern countries they engage in certain rituals to suppress the rights of women…violent practices for example, and I know that in the western world, many countries in the western world would consider those human rights violations, but in those countries it would just be what they do.

Similarly, Anna explained,

People in just, say, Middle Eastern countries where people don’t have rights or the men would believe that women shouldn’t have rights or that everyone is entitled to freedom of religious beliefs…Middle Eastern countries would really restrict human rights while people in America and Western Europe [would not].

In both Ireland and Northern Ireland, on the other hand, the most frequently identified region was Africa, which accounted for around a fifth of students’ total responses (as well as about one-tenth of responses in the United States). Students sometimes noted the presence of political discrimination, such as historically in South Africa, but they more often pointed to the lack of adequate living standards and access to education, or to the threat to personal security posed by forcing children to become soldiers. In Northern Ireland, for example, Justin noted, ‘Everyone is entitled to an adequate standard of living…I think it’s kind of focused on other countries, sort of in the African region’; he also pointed out that ‘in the African countries…children are being subjected to [becoming] child soldiers…and because of the lack of education there they may not be aware of what rights they have’. US student Landon observed,

In a lot of Third World countries, you know, African countries, a lot of Asian countries, South American as well, you don’t have the kind of health care and the kind of money that we have here, and so, you have people suffering from illnesses, natural disasters, stuff like that.

As is evident in Landon’s quotation, students also sometimes identified Asia and South America as regions with human rights violations. References to South America, though, were rare and nonspecific (except by Colombian students). In Ireland and Northern Ireland, references to Asia were also rare, although one Irish student pointed to censorship of the internet in China, and another noted the lack of trade unions there. US students mentioned specific Asian countries more frequently (in almost one-tenth of their responses); they pointed to poverty in India, restrictions on movement in North Korea, and general government oppression in China. Cassidy, for example, explained,

Like what’s happening in China, where anyone who says anything against the government either disappears for months or they’re just not given a trial at all. They’re not told why they are put on trial…There is no real movement to have any change because they are so afraid of the government and kind of what everyone else is saying…China is not known for its human rights.

In summary, students in Ireland and the United States – and to lesser extent, in Northern Ireland – primarily positioned human rights as issues that were important in distant countries. They pointed to lack of education, inadequate standards of living, discrimination, political oppression, and threats to personal security as characteristic of economically underdeveloped countries and those with repressive cultural norms or political systems – particularly in Africa and the Middle East. Unless students were specifically asked, references to human rights violations in economically developed regions, or in countries with mature democracies, were almost completely absent, except when referring to historic events such as the Holocaust in Europe or legal segregation in the United States.

Students’ own countries

Unless specifically asked about their own country, only about one-tenth of responses in Ireland or the United States referred to human rights violations in those two nations, and in the United States these were primarily references to past events (particularly historic racial segregation) rather than contemporary issues. In Colombia and Northern Ireland, on the other hand, about a third of responses pointed to present-day national issues (including, in Northern Ireland, a small number of references by Protestant students to the United Kingdom as a whole.)

In Northern Ireland, most references to contemporary issues – both those that students mentioned on their own, and those in response to the question, ‘Which are the biggest issues around here?’—related to freedom of religion or the closely related issues of discrimination and freedom of assembly, as well as to recent examples of racism against immigrants. This was true at both Catholic and Protestant schools. Audrey, at the Catholic school, explained,

In Northern Ireland there’s a lot of sectarian views, and people are discriminating against people because of their religion, and people aren’t like always allowed to practice their religion as freely as they want to, because they may be afraid of getting hurt or put down because of it.

Another girl at the same school noted,

Especially in Northern Ireland, religion is a big issue and you like sometimes feel like you shouldn’t show like what your religious beliefs are for fear of being discriminated against, or for fear of like not being treated fairly by someone like an employer, you wouldn’t want to assert your religion as such.

Some Protestant students talked about these issues as though they were primarily in the past, but others noted their ongoing relevance. Hailey, for example, explained,

In Northern Ireland, I think religion’s a big problem, because of the Troubles. There’s still sectarianism going on, and I think although there has been the Good Friday agreement, and Catholics and Protestants have joined together, there’s still a lot of things going on in the background, and they’re trying to be hidden, but everyone knows it’s still going on.

Students at both schools in Northern Ireland also noted that discrimination had more recently extended to recent immigrants. Matthew explained that protection from discrimination was important because ‘in modern times, with racism become more evident in our society – it’s actually overtaken sectarianism—so this right basically protects people of basically all creeds and any sort of features’. His interview partner Phillip agreed:

Opinion, religion, or race, that’s a big issue here because, obviously, we have had the troubles and sectarianism and all that and also today with an increase in immigration there’s also been problems of racism, like the Romanians in Belfast.

Sheela also explained,

People were so narrow-minded about the thought of Romanians living like next door to them, even though it’s not really affecting them at all, they’re just ordinary people, and that caused them to have to leave their homes, with children, and education was all destroyed basically, and they had to go find somewhere else to live, and generally were made to feel unwelcome whenever they shouldn’t, you have that right to move anywhere you want in the world, and if people want to live here, that should be fine, and they shouldn’t be discriminated against, no matter where they’re from, cause everyone’s equal.

In Colombia, most references to national human rights issues focused on personal security and the right to move freely. Juliana observed, ‘The majority of people from bad neighborhoods go out with fear, they know that if they cross the line into another area you’ll get killed. That is life here in Colombia’. Valentina also noted,

I think [the most important right] should be the right to circulate freely in your country, not because of the government violating that but because of the guerrillas and paramilitaries, but those are the invisible limits that don’t allow you to go to certain places in the country because you are afraid. Even though there was a time that things were much worse here, it is still a problem.

Natalia explained,

I’d say personal security [is the most important] because Colombia has been affected by guerrillas, by paramilitaries, by all those things. I think that from that, other rights are violated, because if a person can’t go out to school and study because they’ll get killed by paramilitaries, or I can’t travel freely within my country because I’ll get killed by guerillas.

Also pointing to restrictions on movement, Jano noted, ‘More than anything, in Colombia we live that. We can’t go from one corner to another, or from here to there’.

Other students in Colombia pointed to the importance of economic rights. Francisca noted that ‘there are still a lot of people who don’t have an adequate standard of living’, and that ‘there are children begging in the street who should be in school’. Ricardo explained that an adequate standard of living was important ‘because rich people have all the opportunities, a good education, but poor people don’t, and that leads to a lot of the security problems, and if there was equality we wouldn’t have them’. Jano also noted that protection from unemployment ‘is a big problem in Colombia because people don’t have jobs, and there is poverty’. A few students also pointed to the importance of a fair trial. Jorge, for example, noted, ‘I think it’s a right to a fair trial, because that is a problem here in Colombia and punishments are sometimes too severe’. Liliana also explained,

There should be a test to see if the person is really the suspect. Sometimes people in the police, to get more power or a good position, or pride, they accuse the wrong person. That happened on a soap opera, but they are demonstrating reality.

Only occasionally did US students spontaneously provide contemporary instances of domestic human rights issues. However, when they were directly asked, ‘Which are the biggest issues around here?’, they easily identified such examples, and they frequently criticized Americans’ ignorance, hypocrisy or lack of concern over domestic human rights problems. Aimee, for example, pointed out, ‘In the United States I think we like to get caught up in the fact that we don’t have discrimination, or we don’t have biases and all these sorts of things, and we kind of just throw that back at the Third World, and I do think that discrimination is still an issue today’. US students mentioned a variety of domestic issues, including discrimination against immigrants, freedom of opinion, fair trials, religious freedom and the right to join a trade union. Several students pointed to economic problems, and particularly to disparities in standards of living or access to education. As Sam noted, ‘I also feel that other issues we’re dealing with today are adequate living standards, food, housing, and medical care….With living standards there is obviously a gap between the rich and the poor’.

By far the most common human rights issue mentioned by US students was lack of marriage equality. Students mentioned this in nearly every interview, and those who spoke about it unanimously supported lifting such restrictions. As Eve noted,

I think that discrimination goes hand in hand with ‘Everyone has the right to be married’. When people are telling you that just because you are homosexual you can’t get married, that is just, it’s mind boggling because I don’t see why it’s anyone else’s business. I think that if we are going to say that our country doesn’t have discrimination and then we say that you can’t get married just because you’re the same sex we don’t have the right not to be discriminated against.

Sophie also explained, ‘I definitely think marriage is the big one, because gay rights… Everyone doesn’t have the right to be married in America even though I think we try to say that we do give that right to everyone’.

As in the United States, students in the Republic of Ireland had no trouble identifying domestic issues when asked; most of their responses involved either marriage equality or freedom from discrimination. Harriet, for example, explained, ‘We only have civil partnerships, which basically means, it’s virtually married, but it’s not actually married…you can’t be married as such’. Her interview partner Richelle added, ‘Ireland’s definitely a Catholic country, and that has a direct impact on why we’re only at the civil partnership phase now’. Other students identified a variety of groups who faced discrimination in Ireland (and specifically in Dublin), including Travelers, Eastern European immigrants, Muslims, Blacks and women. Alanna noted, ‘There’s so many people around us who get discriminated’; her interview partner Tom added,

Lots of people have moved here recently like Polish, and like Central European people, so they all, some of them mightn’t feel as welcomed, like Irish people mightn’t be as welcoming to immigrants that come over, as much as they treat them differently to their own.

In sum, students in Colombia and Northern Ireland spontaneously mentioned national dimensions of human rights in about one-third of their responses. Colombian students pointed to issues of security and freedom of movement, along with violations of economic rights, while those in Northern Ireland primarily emphasized discrimination, related both to the community divide and to recent immigration to the region. Students in the United States and the Republic of Ireland spontaneously mentioned domestic issues in only about one-tenth of their responses, but when directly asked they were able to supply numerous example of human rights problems in their own countries. In both countries, the most common such issue was the lack of marriage equality; students in the Republic of Ireland also frequently mentioned various forms of discrimination.

Students’ local communities

One of the most striking differences among countries was the frequency with which students mentioned human rights issues they had directly experienced or witnessed in their communities. Students in Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the United States almost never brought up violations of human rights in their immediate vicinities. Even when asked about issues ‘around here’, they rarely related personal experiences, except for infrequent and vague mention of having witnessed discrimination or discriminatory attitudes. Most domestic examples in these countries derived from the media, or from lessons in school. Students in Colombia, on the other hand, mentioned their own experiences (or those of people they knew) in half of their responses. Notably, all these responses came from students in the four public schools. (Those in the private school pointed to problems that existed both locally and throughout Colombia, but without any indication they had personal experiences with them.)

Gimena’s quotation at the beginning of this article points to the danger these students face when traveling from one neighborhood to another. She went on to say, ‘I’m afraid if people see me on the street with certain people, it will cause big problems for me’. Her interview partner Paula also noted, ‘In my house I’m always afraid. With my little brother, I always bring him inside the house after 5 pm because it is dangerous. That is definitely limiting our rights, because we can’t be free when we’re afraid’. Similarly, in another interview Sergio noted, ‘You know if you go out, you can’t stay out later than 10 [pm] because you’ll get killed or kidnapped, or you don’t know what might happen to you’. And Valeria, from another school, explained, ‘People will kill you for a pair of shoes. Violence is a big problem here and we live with fear all the time’. Other students pointed to violations of economic rights. Alejandro, for example, explained,

I see a lot of people on the street begging. People should be able to have a home. Lots of people where we live don’t have a real house…I think a lot of people don’t know that they have this right.

These students’ responses illustrated their ongoing, intense, and deeply personal experience with restrictions of their movement and threats to their personal security, as well as with violations of economic rights.

Discussion

Although the nature of the interview process and the uneven and non-representative sampling prevents precise comparisons across nations, the dominant trends in students’ responses suggest some of the ways in which personal, community, and national political factors can influence students’ understanding of where human rights issues are most salient, and which rights are important in those locations. Students in the Republic of Ireland and the United States usually positioned human rights violations as affecting nations that were distant from themselves – particularly those in the Middle East and Africa – and which experienced a range of problems related to each category of human rights. A much larger portion of students in Northern Ireland and Colombia, on the other hand, emphasized national issues, particularly civil and political rights in Northern Ireland, and economic and personal security issues in Colombia. Although students in the Republic of Ireland and the United States could catalog such issues when asked, they rarely did so spontaneously. Finally, the students in public schools in Colombia – unlike those in any other location – often focused on problems in their local communities, particularly threats to personal security and restrictions on movement.

These findings add to the growing body of theory and research pointing to the influence of contextual factors on students’ thinking (Barton and Avery, 2015, Torney-Purta et al., 1999). The impact of personal experience is particularly clear across settings. Students in Colombia who discussed local issues were those who faced ongoing restrictions on their movements and threats to their own security. None of the students in the other settings was likely to have had such direct and fundamental experiences with human rights violations. Those in Northern Ireland, for example, came from neighborhoods in which they were unlikely to have directly witnessed contentious aspects of community relations, and their attendance at single-denomination schools would have further lessened such exposure. Most students in the United States and the Republic of Ireland, meanwhile, came from middle-class or economically privileged homes and communities, and even those from immigrant and ethnic minority backgrounds in the United States were primarily from relatively affluent families. These students did not suggest that they or their families had experienced significant discrimination; and within Colombia, private-school students from safe neighborhoods never mentioned personal experiences with human rights.

Students’ responses also reflected differing national discourses. In Northern Ireland, discussion of issues related to civil and political rights are prevalent in the media, political speech, and daily discussion; by the time students are in secondary school, almost all – like those in this study – would be aware of continuing community and political discord, even when they have not directly experienced such conflict. Similarly, private-school students in Colombia – despite not having experienced human rights violations themselves – were well aware of these at the national level; as noted earlier, violence and economic deprivation are widely discussed in the media and political discourse there. In both locations, then, students emphasized human rights as an issue that affected their nation (meaning Northern Ireland for most students there, rather than the entire United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland).

By contrast, the national dimension of human rights was less salient for students in the United States and the Republic of Ireland. Domestic issues of violence, poverty, or discrimination are certainly evident in the media and political discourse in each of these countries, but they are less prevalent than in the other two, and the discourse of human rights is less often used as a way of framing such domestic issues. In both countries, on the other hand (as well as in Northern Ireland), students are likely to encounter media depictions of human rights violations in distant nations, particularly those experiencing political violence and oppression or significant economic deprivation. These occur, in part, through appeals to charity in the media and popular culture, and such appeals are also a frequent feature of school life in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In addition, extensive US foreign policy involvement in areas of conflict, and Irish involvement in regions of economic underdevelopment and political oppression, increases the visibility of violations of civil and political rights in other world regions. Students drew from these prevailing representations to position human rights as issues that primarily affected countries distant from their own.

The impact of instruction on students’ understanding is difficult to establish, because this research did not include classroom observations or in-depth exploration of the enacted curriculum. However, interviews with teachers in each of the settings suggest that the relationship between school instruction and other contextual factors is a complicated one. Most teachers expressed an interest in helping students apply concepts to a variety of settings – from local to international – in a way that is clearly in keeping with the universal nature of human rights. In most cases, though, this effort focused more on some settings than others, and this emphasis was generally consistent with other societal forces. In public schools in Colombia, for example, instruction focused on investigating and proposing solutions to local problems; in the United States (particularly the East Coast school), and in the Republic of Ireland, the primary emphasis was on international issues; and in Northern Ireland, global issues and the community divide shared priority. The messages students received from schools and other sources, then, were mutually reinforcing, and this may have contributed to patterns in their responses.

Notably, however, each of the US teachers explained that they specifically aimed to extend students’ understanding of the location of human rights issues. They recognized that students primarily thought of these in terms of distant nations, and they hoped to counter that impression. The teacher in the Mountain West school, for example, explained the importance of local civic action projects by noting, ‘Our kids struggle to make sense of what are human rights abuses here. They can easily see what it is in Syria, or places that we talk about around the world, but to say, “This is a human rights abuse here, in our community” – that’s more difficult’. East Coast teachers made similar observations about students’ tendency to focus on underdeveloped nations, and they noted their own efforts to call attention to human rights abuses in the United States. These teachers may well have been successful in their efforts, because US students had little trouble identifying domestic human rights issues when asked – although their responses were skewed toward highly visible public issues such as marriage equality. International issues, however, still dominated their responses and seemed to be the most salient settings for them. Their perspectives may have been expanded, but they did not position human rights issues equally across contexts.

These findings indicate that in order to develop a more universal and comprehensive understanding of human rights, educators may need to design instruction that supplements rather than reinforces students’ prior ideas. This is not to say that schools should neglect the concerns that students already have. Students in Colombia who experience daily violations of their human rights, for example, deserve to learn how they can propose local policy solutions that may have an immediate benefit to themselves and their communities. Those in Northern Ireland also deserve the opportunity to study important national rights issues, particularly when these have consequences for their own lives and communities (Emerson and Lundy, 2013). At the other end of the spectrum, studying less economically developed countries is an appropriate focus for many US students, who are in a position to influence human rights in underdeveloped countries through their current or future political participation in one of the world’s most powerful nations.

One of the defining characteristics of human rights, however, is their universality, and educators often emphasize the need for students to understand and appreciate this dimension of the topic. Human rights education could not be considered successful if students came away believing either that such issues only affect the citizens of impoverished nations and repressive regimes, or that they should be concerned only with local or national issues. The value of human rights education lies precisely in its ability to promote a common set of standards that can be used to evaluate situations both near and far, under governments both democratic and authoritarian, and in countries both rich and poor. As one Irish teacher put it, when asked her top priority for students’ learning:

I would like [students] to have empathy with everyone else in the world as another human being…whether that is somebody starving in Africa, or a homeless person in Dublin, or the victim of bullying in the schoolyard – that they would be able to empathize and understand, have an instinctive reaction that it’s wrong, and that is an abuse of human rights.

This teacher points not only to the affective dimension of students’ thinking—their concern with everyone, no matter their location – but to their conceptual recognition of the universal applicability of human rights. Being able to apply human rights principles to all people, in a variety of settings, is an important intellectual achievement with profound civic consequences. It provides a common set of standards for evaluating institutional arrangements and the actions of those in power, as well as a powerful justification for attempting to address violations.

Such recognition, though, may be challenging for students whose backgrounds have placed them in positions of relative privilege. For example, Niens et al. (2006) found that Northern Ireland students from the Protestant/Unionist community were initially less concerned with human rights than those from the Catholic/Nationalist community (although their interest increased after participation in a human rights education project). Torney and Brice (1979), meanwhile, found that White US students saw US protection of rights as the standard against which other countries’ human rights efforts should be judged. The civic consequences of human rights education will be difficult to achieve if relatively privileged students do not see its relevance to their own settings.

There is no indication in these findings that teachers were unsuccessful in helping students understand the universality of human rights. However, the salience of different locations clearly varied by context. Students may have recognized that human rights are universal, that is, but they emphasized some sites more than others, and their perceptions derived from a combination of personal experience, school instruction, and wider societal contexts. Teachers who hope to expand students’ ideas and perceptions, then, may need to take greater steps to emphasize the application of human rights in settings other than those with which they are already familiar. For example, teachers such as those in the United States, who wanted to make sure that students saw human rights as a national as well as an international issue, may need to address national (and local) dimensions of the topic even more frequently, in order to counter the messages students come across in the media and public discourse.

Teachers may want to be especially careful not to reinforce messages about the pervasiveness of human rights violations in the Middle East and in predominantly Muslim countries. Many of the students in this research – particularly in the United States – appeared to regard these locations as archetypal cases of discrimination, which they saw as deeply rooted in cultural patterns and as standing in direct contrast to the enlightened tolerance of the West. Such representations circulate widely in the media and popular culture. In the United States, positioning Islam and the Middle East as intolerant and discriminatory can serve as a means of establishing some Americans’ own national identity and of justifying nationalism and foreign intervention (Abu El-Haj, 2010). In addition to over-simplifying differences between Islam and the West, such depictions do little justice to the perspectives of Muslim women, or more generally to those whose lives differ from students’ own. Forms of dress that students in this study thought of as oppressive, for example, often result from conscious choice and cultural preferences (Abu-Lughod, 2013). Students need to learn, then, that the universality of entitlement to human rights is not equivalent to uniformity of application, and that people whose experiences differ from their own are not necessarily passive victims of human rights violations. This would, in fact, constitute a major achievement in learning about human rights: Expanding students’ understanding of how universal rights can be meaningfully applied in differing local, national, or regional contexts.

Implications for future research

The central finding of this research – that students’ backgrounds influenced their thinking about human rights – suggests a number of fruitful avenues for future research. Chief among these is investigation of students’ thinking in other countries and from other backgrounds. Students from countries that differ culturally from those in this study – for example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, or Asia and the Pacific – might have very different perspectives on human rights. Similarly, differences between public and private school students in Colombia suggest that social class background (and accompanying experiences) influences the thinking of those within a single nation; future research might investigate how not only social class but also racial background, immigrant status, religious affiliation, or gender affects students’ thinking within and across national contexts. The impact of students’ educational experiences also merits investigation: How do differing levels of exposure to human rights education, and differing curricular and pedagogical approaches, influence students’ understanding? Such research might examine not only questions of where students position human rights as important, and which rights they consider salient, but what they think should be done to protect or ensure those rights.

In addition, future research might make use of elicitation tasks that are developed to yield more precise information on specific aspects of students’ thinking. In this study, asking students to select from an array of captioned images of human rights appeared to promote their interest and engagement, and to encourage them to talk about concrete issues. However, it was not always clear that students were focusing on human rights issues per se or whether they were simply referring to what they considered important social or interpersonal issues – or whether they even made such distinctions. For example, although students often identified an adequate standard of living as one of the most important rights, their discussions sometimes implied that they did not think all people were entitled to this as a right, but rather that they thought it was a significant social issue that should lead to humanitarian responses. Future research might explicitly ask students to distinguish human rights issues from humanitarian or interpersonal issues in order to see what distinctions (if any) they make between rights and other social demands.

Similarly, tasks could be developed to more directly gauge students’ positioning of the location of human rights issues. Apart from the question, ‘Which are the most important issues around here?’, the interview protocol in this study did not directly elicit students’ ideas about location, and so the analysis here is based in large part on their answers to more general questions. Students’ positioning could be addressed more directly through ranking or sorting tasks, or scenario-based questions, that systematically vary the location of issues. Such tasks, however, would have to be carefully designed both to avoid the implication that some people’s rights are more important than others, and to prevent responses based on social desirability (i.e., the potential for students to give what they perceive as the ‘correct’ answer).

Conclusions

Rarely do students simply adopt messages they encounter in a single setting; instead, they actively construct understanding from a variety of influences. In this study, students from different countries – and from different school types, in the case of Colombia – held diverse ideas about where human rights issues are most salient, even though all recognized the universal applicability of such rights. Students in the United States and the Republic of Ireland emphasized issues in politically oppressive and economically underdeveloped nations, particularly in Africa and the Middle East; private school students in Colombia stressed national issues, while those in Northern Ireland pointed to national issues along with those in distant countries; and public school students in Colombia noted both national and local manifestations of the topic. In each case, students’ ideas reflected not only what they had learned at school but their differing personal experience with human rights, combined with messages they encountered in the media and public discourse. Educators should not underestimate the power of factors outside school, because students draw from these in constructing their framework for understanding society. These provide an important starting point for instruction, and they may constitute one of the most important contexts for students’ learning. However, in order to help students see the utility of human rights for evaluating societal practices and institutions at a variety of scales, educators may need to more thoroughly address settings other than those that are most prominent in students’ thinking.