Minors’ rights from the adolescents’ point of view. Sense of responsibility, social representations, and protective factors

We’ll introduce a study about what is now considered one of the most important themes of the contemporary society, the rights of minors. The main theoretical reference scenario of the present research is an emergent yet significant trend of social psychology which considers human rights as social representations, in an epoch which has been defined as the “age of rights”. In keeping with this theoretical perspective, the social representations of human rights have been hypothesized as a representational field possessing an internal organization of its own. Research has shown that its main organizing principles are elucidators of interindividual differences and that its anchorage resides in the subjets’ previous symbolic systems of meaning, considered in reference to their specific social insertions (Doise, 2001; Doise, Clémence and Lorenzi Cioldi, 1994). On the basis of this approach, a kind of research has got under way, whose value is paradigmatic, also for its relative methodology. In this field empirical studies have developed more especially in relationship with socially weak subjects, such as children. Taken together, these studies have shown wide consensus on the rights of minors, while at the same time, quite a diversified representational panorama in reference to rights belonging to this specific social category, especially in more problematic situations (Molinari and Emiliani, 1999; Petrillo and Donizzetti, 2003; 2004). This study stands out to further the investigation into the genesis and evolution of the social representations of minors’ rights, and into their anchorage to social memberships, in subjects in different socio-cultural contexts, with a quantitative methodology. This objective may be further specified, as follows: to contribute at the development of the culture of the infant’s rights, as a factor of secondary preventions of violations and discriminations against minors, through an in depth examination of the knowledge on minors’ rights, towards an increase in wide spread sensitivity, and towards a greater awareness of the contradictions and the ambivalences in the positions adopted in this regard, as well as a feeling of greater perceived self-efficacy. Will be presented the results of the study carried out with students of secondary school, pre-adolescents and adolescents (N=400), attending “normal” schools and “at risk” schools of scholastic dispersion.