The Age Issue - [Right On Step #3]

Step Three: The Age Issue

An activity to raise awareness of Human Rights protection and violations especially relevant to different age groups, as well as the universality of Human Rights.

The Age Issue This is an activity to raise awareness of Human Rights protection and violations that can be especially relevant to different age groups, as well as the universality of Human Rights. We encourage participants to put the Attitudes, Skills and Knowledge they gained through the activity to practice in CISV programmes they might be attending this summer.

ASK – Attitudes, Skills, Knowledge After completing this activity, participants should have developed the following: Attitudes (Willingness to):

■ Apply gained ASK to summer programs participants might attend.

■ Tailor Human Rights education activities to target groups in a specific age group.

Skills (Ability to):

■ Consider Human Rights protections and violations that are not necessarily linked to one’s own age group.

■ Empathize with people of one’s own age group whose Human Rights are being violated, and reflect on how they could be protected.

Knowledge (Understanding of):

■ Human Rights protections and violations especially relevant to specific age groups.

Adjust this activity to your JB’s needs!

You can use all this material however you want – Only like the ASK? Great! Think the debrief questions are lame? Change them! Want to focus on only the 'Do' part of the activity and add the rest yourself ? Perfect. Nobody knows your JB's needs better than you do.

Basic Information & Preparation

▪ Time: roughly 1 hour, 15 minutes ▪ Material: Pens, paper, other arts and crafts material if necessary

The Activity - Do, Reflect, Generalize, Apply Do (25 minutes) 1. Split the group into smaller groups of four people. Assign an age to each of them (see material 1) and possibly a country and background material, if you want (see ‘tips for facilitators’).

2. Participants can decide if their person is male or female. Ask participants to draw a person of the age they have been given, considering the following questions: a) What could this person’s hobbies be? b) What could this person’s job be? Is she/he a student? Does he/she serve in the military? c) What does your character need to be happy and to succeed (maybe more than at a ______________ Page 1/5

different age)? d) In which ways is a person of this age particularly vulnerable?

(Feel free to add any other questions you think might be interesting to the participants!)

Reflect & Generalize (30 minutes) Now that groups have drawn their person, have them discuss the following questions. You can add the Human Rights star (material 2) and the UDHR (material 3) as background information.

While doing this, participants can mark body parts of their person that might be connected with the Human Rights violations they have discussed.

For example: For the right to participate in government – Art. 21, Nr. 1 UDHR – for somebody aged about 18+ years, the head could be labeled. a) Which concrete Human Rights protections are especially relevant to this age, and which Human Right do they reflect?

For example: Protecting and guaranteeing the Right to Education might be especially important for 9year-olds.) b) Which concrete Human Rights violations are especially relevant to this age, and which Human Right do they reflect?

For example: Violating Freedom of Religion might be especially relevant for 22- or 31-years-old who are thinking about getting married according to their religion. c) Take a look at the beginning words of each UDHR article. What do you notice?

Almost every article starts with the words “everyone or “no one”. Human Rights are universal, so everyone is born with and possesses the same rights, regardless of age.

Apply (20 minutes) 1. Have all groups lay out their ‘person’ and give participants about 5 minutes to look at the other groups’ work and discuss it, especially in regard to similarities in their ‘people’s’ needs.

2. Form new groups with one participant from each group and discuss the following: ▪ How can you start and have a good conversation with an X-year old (take one age from material 1 per group) person about human rights? (see Material 4) ▪ Are you attending any of CISV's programmes this summer? How can Human Rights Education be made especially interesting for this programme’s participants (age)?

4. Lay the different ‘people’ out in a line, according to age. Give participants some more time to discuss, individually or with everyone.

5. Please take a picture and send it to righton@ijb.cisv.org to share it with Junior Branches around the world.

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Evaluation After you’ve run the activity, please fill out this (quick!) form to help us improve and keep track of Right On: http://bit.ly/13eF7TC

Tips for facilitators: ▪ You can assign the groups (and their characters) specific countries if you want. For background material, you can use the country files from Amnesty International’s Annual Report for 2012: http://www.amnesty.org/en/annual-report/2012 ▪ If you’re running a camp or weekend, you can hang up the results for everybody to look at after the activity is over.

▪ Stick to the time limits and announce them.

▪ Explain each step of the activity by giving examples and make sure e verybody understands.

▪ As a facilitator, don’t express opinions - take a step back.

▪ This is step three of a sequence of human rights activities, so there might be more questions than answers at this point.

▪ We encourage you to write down questions you find difficult to answer and send t hem in – Right On has access to a network of experts and will try their best to get back to you with good answers.

Introducing your Junior Branch to ‘Right On’ After you’ve run this activity, you can tell your juniors about Right On - the goal is to emphasize the Global Movement of Junior Branch in each chapter. You can tell them to check out the facebook page (facebook.com/righton2013) and tumblr page (righton2013.tumblr.com) to see the results of the activity you just ran and other JB’s results from around the world.

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Material 1 Age

11 years old

22 years old 31 years old 55 years old

82 years old

(These are just suggestions, you can use any ages you want.)

Material 2

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Material 3 – The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Choose the version of the UDHR most useful for your Junior Branch and the setting you’re running the activity in: Con Lupa has made an English full text and shortened version of the UDHR available on their website: http://cisv.no/conlupa/printable-versions-of-the-udhr/ Find the UDHR in simple English here: http://www.un.org/cyberschoolbus/humanrights/resources/plain.asp Find the UDHR in all languages here: http://www.ohchr.org/en/udhr/pages/searchbylang.aspx

Material 4 – Human Rights Education at different ages CISV International has released this resource: Guidance on characteristics of different age groups and what this means for human rights education

Material 5 - UN Convention on the Rights of the Child What the UDHR means in relation to children has been spelled out in a specific declaration (the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child), which specifies and adds protections answering to children’s particular needs and vulnerabilities.

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