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Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

Youth political engagement is often ignored and downplayed by adults, who often embrace a youth deficit model. The youth deficit model downplays the voices and unique experiences of youth in favor of adult-led and adult-centered experiences. Like other historical deficit models, the youth deficit model also provides permission to adults to speak for or about youth, even when not asked to speak for them. We refer to this powerful construction of youth interests by adults as mediation. Fortunately, online advocacy could offer an unmediated route to political engagement for youth as digital natives. Using a unique dataset, we investigate whether online protest spaces offer an unmediated experience for youth to learn about and engage in political protest. However, we find that youth engagement, and especially unmediated youth engagement, is rare among advocacy digital spaces, though it varies by movement, SMO-affiliation, and age groups. Based on our findings, we argue that, rather than youth being primarily responsible for any alleged disengagement, the lack of online spaces offering opportunities for youth to take ownership of their own engagement likely discourages youth from participating in traditional political advocacy and renders the level of youth engagement an admirable accomplishment of young people.

Purpose – UK laws surrounding the duty to prevent individuals being drawn into terrorism often focus on the need to safeguard the populace from exploitation by terrorist or extremist groups. It is within this context that countering violent extremism (CVE) work often takes place. This chapter explores how this legal duty shapes CVE projects in the UK, drawing on practitioner’s perspectives.

Methods – Writing from the perspective of practitioners from ConnectFutures, an organization that has been operating since 2013 in the UK and internationally, who advocate for a contextual safeguarding approach to provide a more holistic attitude to the prevention of violent extremism and exploitation.

Findings – Exploring the intersections between multiple forms of criminal exploitation, as well as engaging in the spaces and places young people experience harm, allows practitioners working in the CVE space to contribute to the protection of individuals from terrorist and extremist radicalization.

Originality/Value – Applying the new developed contextual safeguarding framework to CVE projects provides a contemporary and alternative ways to conduct CVE work. The chapter provides overviews of three CVE projects running with young people today in the UK, exploring how the new frameworks are adopted within these programs, all designed to address the complex causes of violent extremism.

The Child Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) is a UNICEF-led collective impact intervention aimed at promoting children’s rights at the city and community levels. The CFCI operationalizes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) for local governments through a framework for action aimed at realizing the rights of young people under 18 years of age: (1) to be valued, respected and treated fairly; (2) to be heard; (3) to access social services; (4) to be safe; and (5) to participate in family, life, play and leisure. This chapter provides an historical analysis of the CFCI globally and in the United States, and how this intervention draws upon and advances sociological research on young people’s meaningful participation. We present three case studies to analyze young people’s participation in CFCIs and the lessons learned from Houston, Texas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and San Francisco, California.

In this chapter, we will look at how the indirect approach can enable us to find a way to learn about young people's lives. The setting for this chapter is informal youth work, reminding us of the value of a wide range of practices with young people, and the findings are equally relevant to formal and informal education as guiding principles for good practice. We will look at the skillful interactions practitioners establish with young people and how they can be developed and promoted. Reflective practice for practitioners is identified as beneficial in adding the value of young people's voice, whilst building relationships. The nature of young people's participation and power is argued to benefit from a co-constructed and socio-cultural understanding; majoring on the importance of context, indirect method and equality literacy framework. We will suggest how the indirect approach can improve young people's lives in schools and/or youth provision.

Purpose – In recent years, various communities across Canada have recognized the need to include young people's input in community/urban decision-making processes. As a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Canadian governments and policy makers are obligated to take young people's views into consideration when decisions about them are made. The aim of this chapter is to examine how some communities have attempted to involve young people in such decision making by creating youth advisory councils.Design/methodology/approach – This chapter draws on an open-ended small-scale survey conducted with youth council members and adults familiar with the operation of youth councils.Findings – The findings suggest that many youth councils were mostly initiated by adults for youth. However, the successes of these youth councils were many. Participants reported that youth councils provided young people with a voice on an array of issues ranging in scope from local to national/international. Despite these successes, the ability of young people to have a voice in decisions that affected them was hindered by the many challenges that youth councils faced (e.g., lack of adult support).Originality/value – This chapter provides strategies to help overcome barriers to genuine youth participation in the decision-making processes of communities/cities. It also critically engages with the concept of participation as it relates to youth councils as an avenue for enhancing young people's civic and political lives. Finally, it adds to the literature by examining the Canadian context which has often been overlooked in research on youth councils.

With confidence in the British Political system in decline, it is more important than ever that the top-down approach to decision-making and service strategy in public services is challenged. In this chapter, we examine how coproduction of services can be achieved using Get Talking, an approach to participatory action research that utilizes creative consultation techniques to engage with publics. We explain how the approach enabled Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) to involve young people in the development of a Children and Young People’s Strategy. The case study approach, building on qualitative methods including focus groups and semi-structured interviews, demonstrates how creative approaches were used by public sector staff to engage young people and partners in strategy development. Creative consultation techniques were used to facilitate the focus group activity. While using Get Talking as an approach to policy development required a resource investment in terms of staff time, it provided SFRS with insight into the needs of service users. This resulted in a more relevant strategy being developed and a cultural shift in how the organization works with young people. Engagement with the Get Talking process had a positive effect on staff, providing them with a sense of ownership over the resulting strategy, enhanced the reputation of SFRS with partners, and improved relationships with young people through demonstrating that they were valued partners in coproduction. While the approach was well received by all parties, challenges of using Get Talking in a public service setting resulted in pragmatic adaptations to a traditional PAR approach.

Prior social movement research has focused on the role that axes of inequality – particularly race, class, gender, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) status – play for who participates and how they do so. Age is another important axis of inequality. The pervasiveness of a youth deficit model, which casts young people as deficient and requiring benevolent adult tutelage, is of particular concern for youth. This chapter assesses whether the internalization of the deficit model influences young people's activism and how they perceive their engagement. Drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a southwestern US city, we find that many young people have internalized deficit-model assumptions, affecting when and how they participated. This was most evident among high school students, who limited their participation because they were “not old enough” or gravitated toward more “age-appropriate” forms of activism. Interestingly, we found college students were more willing to engage in online activism but also felt compelled to do significant research on issues before participating, thereby distancing themselves from the deficit model's assumptions of their political naivety. Finally, some participants felt discouraged by the perceived ineffectiveness of protest, which resonated with deficit model narratives of the futility of youth engagement. These findings highlight the importance of understanding the impacts of an internalized deficit model as well as considering age as an axis of inequality in activism. Youth engagement is best supported by seeing young people as capable actors with unique interests, capacities, and points of view.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the narratives that construct the practice and regulation of ‘sexting’, the sending of sexualised images via text message, when engaged in by young people. The aim of this discussion is to better understand the extent to which those narratives recognise young people’s agency in relation to their sexuality and the role that new media plays in enabling youth to explore their sexual identity.

The methodology employed is that of discourse analysis. This approach is used to deconstruct the dominant narrative of sexting contained in the literature, a narrative that constructs it as a problem to be contained and controlled, either through the application of the criminal law or through education and guidance approaches. This paper then investigates an emerging counter narrative that gives greater emphasis to the autonomy rights of youth. A case study involving a Parliamentary Inquiry in one Australian State into sexting is also employed to further this analysis.

This paper concludes that the dominant narrative remains the strongest influence in the shaping of law and the practice of sexting, but that young people may be better served by the counter narrative that recognises their agency in ways that may empower and grant them more control over their bodies.

The paper thus provides an alternative approach to developing new law and policy with respect to the regulation of sexting by youth that should be of value to lawmakers and child and youth advocates.

Football games, youth-led creative projects, spaces to ‘drop in’ and ‘hang out’, mentoring, fun trips are some things that youth work and community organisations do with young people. The informality, flexibility and responsiveness of youth work make it an accessible and important space for young people who are disenfranchised from schooling and even from informal educational services. Furthermore, geography is a constitutive element of youth work, which engages with young people in their everyday neighbourhood spaces, movements and communities, as well as facilitating their mobility beyond the neighbourhood. In this chapter, we reflect on our experiences in the United Kingdom and Slovakia to explore some of the methodologies, challenges and richness of researching the geographies of youth work. Decentring narrative methods in favour of ethnography was essential to capturing the primacy of relationships, the significance of the embodied and emotional and the place-based nature of youth work. However, more than this, ethnographic approaches needed to be aligned with youth work principles, collective dynamics and localised politics. At times, methodological strategies and research agendas – the desire to learn about research participants and their learning, lives, and places – had to be laid aside in favour of a mutual learning to be together. We came to understand both research and the learning that goes on in youth work settings as processes that are simultaneously individual and collective, private and public, cognitive and emotional, spatial and political.