Voice, choice, and action: the potential of young citizens to heal democracy - Felton Earls

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• Compiling decades of fieldwork, two acclaimed scholars offer strategies for strengthening democracies by nurturing the voices of children and encouraging public awareness of their role as citizens.
• Voice, Choice, and Action is the fruit of the extraordinary personal and professional partnership of a psychiatrist and a neurobiologist whose research and social activism have informed each other for the last thirty years.
• Inspired by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Felton Earls and Mary Carlson embarked on a series of international studies that would recognize the voice of children.
• In Romania they witnessed the consequences of infant institutionalization under the Ceaușescu regime.
• In Brazil they encountered street children who had banded together to advocate effectively for themselves.
• In Chicago Earls explored the origins of prosocial and antisocial behavior with teenagers.
• Children all over the world demonstrated an unappreciated but powerful interest in the common good.
• On the basis of these experiences, Earls and Carlson mounted a rigorous field study in Moshi, Tanzania, which demonstrated that young citizens could change attitudes about HIV/AIDS and mobilize their communities to confront the epidemic.
• The program, outlined in this book, promoted children's communicative and reasoning capacities, guiding their growth as deliberative citizens.
• The program's success in reducing stigma and promoting universal testing for HIV exceeded all expectations.