18. Children's Forum and Citizenship Education Among Adolescents

Abstract

Children's voice is considered as unnecessary to be taken into account in development planning up to now, while the number of children is nearly a third of total world populations. Children's Forum is established by the government as the fulfillment of The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to ensure child participation right in development. This research aimed to study the strategic role of Surakarta Children's Forum (Indonesian: Forum Anak Surakarta or FAS) as children's participation media in development and citizen education medium all at once in adolescents, and supporting and inhibiting factor in undertaking the function. This study was a descriptive qualitative research. The informants were determined purposively consisting of FAS members and builders and facilitating NGO, and data analysis was conducted by using an interactive model of analysis. The result showed that FAS had functioned as a means of citizenship education among children and peer adolescents through participating in Development Planning Discussion and becoming peer educator for socializing and introducing public issues related to children's problem. Children's internal capacity becomes a factor supporting FAS's success as a citizenship education media. Constraints originated more from external factor in the form of State Civil Apparatus' low consciousness of children's rights and the builder's inadequate capacity of reinforcing the capacity of Children's forum.