Search results

Rooted in adult fear, adult authority aims to protect and control youth (Gannon, 2008; Valentine, 1997). Continuously negotiating for freedom, youth search for adult-free public spaces and are therefore extremely attracted to social networking sites (boyd, 2007, 2014). However, a significant portion of youth now includes adult authorities within their Facebook networks (Madden et al., 2013). Thus, this study explores how youth navigate familial- and educational-adult authorities across social networking sites in relation to their local peer culture.

Through semi-structured interviews, including youth-centered and participant-driven social media tours, 82 youth from the Northeast region of the United States of America (9–17 years of age; 43 females and 39 males) shared their lived experiences and perspectives about social media during the summer of 2013.

In their everyday lives, youth are subjected to the normative expectations emerging from peer culture, school, and family life. Within these different and at times conflicting normative schemas, youth’s social media use is subject to adult authority. In response, youth develop intricate ways to navigate adult authority across social networking sites.

Adult fear is powerful, but fragile to youth’s interpretation; networked publics are now regulated and youth’s ability to navigate then is based on their social location; and youth’s social media use must be contextualized to be holistically understood.

Both research and child protection practice are still far away from having uniform definitions of violence against children. The different disciplines involved in the sectors of national child protection systems rely on separate discourses and terms; definitions are sometimes rather general or implicit, and operationalizations of important elements are rare. The various terms in use – child maltreatment, child abuse and neglect, child endangerment, children at risk, children in need, etc. – speak of the variety, not only of concepts, but also of practices. With respect to the latter, definitional issues are also issues of the scope and thresholds of intervention. This chapter provides an overview of major terms and definitional approaches to violence against children and identifies eminent differences between them. Findings from several studies on the Swiss child protection system, including the first multi-sectorial national survey on agency responses to child maltreatment, illustrate how professionals use definitions and the consequences of having multiple definitional concepts for documenting reported cases. We conclude by advocating for a consensus-based interdisciplinary process of developing shared definitions of violence against children.

Researchers have been known to complain that practitioners do not listen to their findings or recommendations, and have emphasised the importance of evidence-based practice. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, research concerning children produced a shift leading to a new sociological paradigm of childhood. This paradigm parallels the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), produced at the same time. Both productions emphasise common themes, which in the principles of the CRC are expressed as non-discrimination, children's participation and the best interests of the child. Sociological frameworks and the CRC were brought together in the growing movement to ‘child-rights programming’ (CRP) taken up by many UN and international children's agencies since the turn of the twenty-first century.¹

This chapter discusses how to involve children and young people in decisions and encourage them to express their needs and participate in the decision-making process to develop a quality intervention. By describing the different aspects of projects involving a participatory approach, it shows how giving voice to children and young people unlocked new perspectives regarding the Hungarian child protection system. Participation of children in research is limited in Hungary, partly due to the challenging legislation and authorisation process. This chapter shows how research to develop child-friendly digital tools can contribute to collecting children's views on their needs related to child protection support, and how the process of listening to children can improve parenting and caregiving responses to the needs of younger and older children living with their families or in the child protection system. The chapter analyses the effect of digital applications on children's and young people's capacity to advance towards autonomy, including applications and a video campaign with short video clips created by young people. These projects gave an opportunity for children and youth in the public care system to describe their lives and wishes for the future. The analysis found: (a) for a functional child protection system and to promote development for children and young people, children's voices need to be amplified; (b) by expressing their voices, children become more autonomous; (c) children's voices contribute to decreasing social prejudices against children and young people in public care; and (d) listening to children and youth who age out of care can help professionals working in the child protection system better understand their beneficiaries.

Purpose – This paper presents a critical exploration of the concept of children's ‘participation’ by looking in more detail at children's right to play and the possibilities this presents for a different understanding of children as political actors.Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies a range of concepts, largely drawn from Deleuzian philosophy and children's geographies, to produce an account of playing that unsettles traditional ways of valuing this behaviour. In doing so, it also extends current approaches to children's participation rights by presenting play as a primary way in which children actively participate in their everyday worlds. Observations of children's play are utilised to illustrate the multiple ways in which moments of playfulness enliven the spaces and routines of children's lives.Findings – Playing may be viewed as micro-political expressions in which children collectively participate to establish temporary control over their immediate environment in order to make things different/better. These everyday acts are largely unnoticed by adults and represent a markedly different form of political engagement from the ways in which children are brought into adult-led political realms. Yet playful moments are a vital expression of children's power and ability to influence the conditions of their lives.Originality/value – Thinking differently about playing offers an opportunity to revitalise the very notion of participation. Such a move marks a line of flight which opens up the possibility for everyday collective acts to disturb dominant ways of accounting for adult–child relationships and by doing so establish moments of hope that people can get on and go on together by co-creating more just and participative spaces of childhood.

Considerations of the legal rights of incarcerated juveniles are often concerned with the myriad ways in which due process rights are circumscribed, abridged, or undermined by the operations of the juvenile court (e.g., Berkheiser, 2016; Cleary, 2017; Feld, 1999; Rapisarda & Kaplan, 2016). Studies of youth legal consciousness have additionally sought to explore the role of media, legal status, court experiences, and even parents in the formation of youth attitudes about the justice system (e.g., Abrego, 2011; Brisman, 2010; Greene, Sprott, Madon, & Jung, 2010; Pennington, 2017). This chapter builds on this work by exploring the way rights shaped the everyday lives of incarcerated youth. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a juvenile hall, this chapter explores three different moments outside of a formal legal context where the invocation of due process rights limited the self-expression and exploration of incarcerated youth. In each of these cases, the invocation of protecting due process rights by adults served to stifle youth efforts to remake juvenile hall as a place open and receptive to their needs. These three moments demonstrate that rights project a particular legal vision onto a world that does not neatly conform to the reality in which youth lived. For these reasons, the consideration of legal rights for youth must also consider how these rights can forestall the very transformation in circumstances that many youth seek.

One of the aspects that characterises neoliberal societies is the increasing attribution of individual responsibility. Citizens are required to commit themselves to adopting ‘appropriate’ lifestyles and to self-managing their health. Individual responsibility translates into a set of knowledge and techniques of self-governance, through which individuals learn and are expected to act in an increasingly autonomous way in order to prevent or mitigate health risks. This fostering of self-governance and individual responsibility affects both children and adults; in accordance with it, adults are required to transmit a sort of model of “pedagogy of responsibility” (Neyrand & Mekboul, 2014), through which children learn to acquire self-management of their health. This scenario becomes complicated if we take into consideration the two usual and contrasting representations of childhood in western societies: children as active subjects, or children as vulnerable subjects. Our work explores these contrasting representations through the narrations of adults and children of their experiences of Type 1 Diabetes.

Childhood is often defined in contrast to adulthood. Each becomes meaningfully linked so that it is difficult to understand what childhood is without looking at adulthood or vice versa. Each becomes what the other is not. In a similar vein, structure and agency are often characterised in contrast to each other. The meaning of each becomes dependent on the meaning of the concept which it is set against. Hence, structure becomes defined as ‘constraint while agency becomes defined as freedom, structure is regarded as static while agency is regarded as active; structure becomes defined as collective while agency becomes defined as individual’ (Hays, 1994, p. 57). This way of conceptualising structure and agency often underplays the interconnections between the two. Up until the 1980s, children were primarily considered within developmental psychology and functionalist socialisation frameworks. The former presented childhood as a natural and universal phase of human life with adulthood being seen as the logical endpoint of childhood. The latter adopting teleological frameworks viewed childhood as a preparation for adulthood and focused in particular on the importance of socialisation in reproducing stable adult personalities. In both approaches, children were considered mainly in terms of presumed future outcomes. In breaking with these approaches, the ‘new sociology of childhood’ sought to emphasise children's agency and to consider children's lives in the here and now rather than as future projects. This has resulted in a plethora of qualitative studies that highlight children's position as active agents. Indeed, in developing a new paradigm for the sociology of childhood, Prout and James (1997) specifically recommend ethnography as a preferred method for uncovering and understanding children's daily lives. This has led Qvortrup (1999, p. 3) to express concern that the ‘adherents of the agency approach are gaining the upper hand’. Qvortrup warns that researchers also need to employ structural approaches to fully understand and illuminate the broader landscape of childhood. He reminds us that childhood is a particular and distinctive form of every society's social structure. Rather than a transient phase, it is a permanent social category shaped by macro forces. While of course children practice agency throughout their childhood and ethnographic studies have been crucial in challenging adults’ conceptions of children as irrational, immature and so on, nonetheless, Qvortrup argues that these studies have been less useful in illuminating the position of childhood in macro societal structures. These wider societal forces position children as a minority group conditioned by resilient power relations based on generation, and they have been relatively immune from children's individual or collective agency. In other words, children act as agents under specific structural conditions. Of course, this does not render children's agency as meaningless. Like adults, children actively produce certain forms of social structure, while simultaneously, social structures produce certain types of childhood (see the chapter by Qvortrup, this volume). Hence, structures are enabling as well as constraining (Giddens, 1984). Indeed over the past two decades, adults are becoming increasingly aware of childhood as a structural form and of the durability of power differentials between adults and children and are increasingly working with children to develop a rights-based agenda to further their collective interests. This could be seen as an example of the collective agency of children although it also illustrates how this agency takes place against a backdrop where existing hierarchies between adults and children structure the conditions under which children practice their agency. One could question whether participating in these recurring forms of social interaction make children agents (Hays, 1994, p. 63).

Child marriage, or marriage between two individuals when one or both are under the age of 18, is legal and practiced in 48 US states. Despite this, child marriage is commonly understood as only occurring in the Global South. Child marriage laws shed light on the paradoxical policies that most US states enforce regarding young people’s sexual agency. By legalizing sex between adults and minors within the institution of marriage, child marriage provides exception to statutory rape laws, which classify sex between minors and adults as sexual violence. In this chapter, I draw on feminist and queer theories to critically examine the racialized and gendered effects of these contradictory state policies. First, I analyze US age of consent laws’ reliance on an adult/child binary that constructs adults and minors as essentially and radically different. Second, I explore efforts to challenge the adult/child binary, looking at how frameworks for understanding sexual violence that are rooted in an adult/child binary can exacerbate young people’s vulnerability to sexual violence. Third, I discuss feminist efforts to theorize sexual violence outside of binary logics and their implications for research on child marriage. I conclude by discussing areas for future research on child marriage that attend to the racialized and gendered inequalities that undergird the state regulation of youth sexualities.