The Children (Scotland) Bill – The Justice Committee’s Recommendations At Stage 1

This blog was written by Fiona Morrison (Lecturer at the Centre for Child Wellbeing and Protection, University of Stirling) and Kay Tisdall (Professor in Childhood Policy, Childhood and Youth Studies Research Group, MHSE, University of Edinburgh). You can follow Fiona and the project on twitter @fifimorrison and @CYSRG1 

This blog was originally posted on at 7^th May 2020 on https://childrensparticipationinfamilylaw.wordpress.com/blog/

The Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament have just issued their Stage 1 Report on the Children (Scotland) Bill. The Bill will reform family law in Scotland, and particularly promises to improve the participation rights of children within family law proceedings. While the Committee approved of this promise, it felt substantial changes and additions were needed to achieve this. We agree. 

We have recently completed research on family law proceedings. Our research finds a number of barriers and challenges to children’s participation in family proceedings in Scotland. The issues of ‘capacity’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘distress’ are especially potent in discussions about implementing children’s participation rights. The framing of contested contact cases as ‘adult disputes’ can exclude children’s views out of fear that involvement will lead to undue pressure on children. In practice, adults’ concerns for children’s vulnerability risk marginalising children’s participation rights. 

Stage 1 Report On The Children (Scotland) Bill 

Our findings informed our written and oral evidence to the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament, on the Children (Scotland) Bill. The Committee’s Stage 1 Report signals that substantial improvements should be made to the Bill. It has made recommendations on a wide range of issues including: removing some barriers for children who wish to instruct their own solicitor; providing children with choices about if and how they participate; and seeking clarity on who will fulfil a court’s duty to provide feedback to children about the decisions it makes. All important and welcome recommendations. 

Particularly welcome are the Committee’s recommendations to ensure the infrastructure and resources to facilitate children’s participation rights. These are critical if we are serious about improving children’s participation rights. Without investment in such an infrastructure, the Bill risks making very little difference to children’s experience of participating in family actions. This is one of the strongest messages we have learnt from our research – and one that children and young people repeatedly tell us.

What More Needs To Be Done?

As work continues to improve the legislation, there are other immediate issues that this Bill must address, as well as longer term reform. 

Children must be given opportunity to be heard directly in legal proceedings. 

This requirement is set out in General Comment No. 12 from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. When children’s views are mediated by an adult (whether that be a child welfare reporter or an advocacy worker), safeguards are in place to ensure that children’s views are reported accurately and directly to the court. 

A child friendly system of complaints and redress must be established for children to use when they believe their rights have been breached.  

This requirement is set out in General Comment No. 12 from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. While referred to in Stage 1 Report, it was not addressed as a recommendation.

In the longer term, radical reform is needed. We need to shift the legal conceptualisation of contested child contact from an adult dispute, to one where concerns about contact are squarely about and inclusive of children. Doing this would assist in realising all of children’s human rights, including their participation rights. It would enable children’s participation rights to be recognised in themselves, as well as the intersections they have with children’s welfare.

Acknowledgments

We wish to acknowledge the funding provided by the Justice Analytical Services (Scottish Government) for the project.

We would also like to acknowledge the wider collaborative learning that informed this research, children, young people and adults. This includes partnership research, Improving Justice in Child Contact (funded by the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (2014-2020)

Bringing girls’ gender identities into children’s rights

Dr Patricio Cuevas-Parra is the Senior Global Policy Adviser for Child Participation and Rights with World Vision International where he leads strategies and programmes to ensure that children and young people's participation are at the centre of the advocacy and policy debate.

Whilst attending the UN Day of General Discussion[1] in Geneva, I was part of a panel discussion of adults and young people sharing the platform equally, which in itself signified much more than dialogue at the UN level; it was a milestone reflecting a substantial change on the way that children and young people can be positioned in public decision-making.

Along with three other young people on the panel was 15 year old Haneen, an outstanding young advocate who is defending and promoting children's rights in her hometown of Palestine.

I was thrilled and honoured to meet and share a panel discussion with her.

To me, the conversation with this child advocate was an enlightening experience that reaffirmed my view and professional work, which falls within the debate on childhood as a social construction and children as competent social actors and active participants in the construction of their lives. This position explores the way we understand children, but also how gender, ethnicity, race, class and other categories are intertwined inseparably, defining how children construct and deconstruct their individualities. Haneen is not just a child; she is a girl, a Muslim, and a Palestinian across many other identities.

Despite the Convention on the Rights of the Child’s Article 2, the principle of non-discrimination, whereby all rights must be respected without discrimination of any kind, girls continue to be treated differently based on social, cultural and legal norms that define their roles and responsibilities in society.

Making assumptions that all children can enjoy their rights and opportunities to participate equally regardless of their gender or other categories fails to recognise that girls can be disadvantaged due the social and cultural contexts in which gender identities are constructed. The denial of gender as a category that determines the chances of girls to engage in social life reinforces and endures legacies of inequality, which continue to be present in most of the countries of the world.

As I was conducting interviews with girls from Uganda, they told me that many girls are marginalised by gender and denied of rights from birth and this continues through their whole lives as daughters, sisters, students, workers, wives and mothers. They also pointed out that gender exclusion is exacerbated by other categories such as race, ethnicity and social status, which shape and restrict their lives and opportunities. This is often attributed to the power dynamics in patriarchal societies, where males are dominant in structures of subordination reinforces gender stigma and stereotyping that confine girls to their homes and degrade their roles in society resulting in an unequal realisation of their rights. By assuming that all children construct their identities and rights equally and their gender does not play a role with the equal opportunity to thrive, increases unbalanced power relations and has a considerable impact on discrimination and disadvantage concerning the deprivation of their rights.

While conducting research in Bangladesh, girls told me that they are often expected to behave according to their gender, that they are socially penalised if they do not follow those traditional or expected patterns and they feel they are less favoured than the boys. In Brazil, girls told me that they are conditioned from birth to be pretty and sweet, but other characteristics like being smart and strong are discouraged. In conversations with girls in Uganda, they told me that the value of a girl is the equivalent of a cow if they are lucky; many others are exchanged or traded for marriage for less than that. In America, I interviewed a group of girls that told me they feel undermined and patronised by their male peers and teachers at school and they are expecting to be sexually harassed if wearing tight clothes or makeup.  

I personally have a strong commitment to looking at the identities and lived experiences of girls and boys and how I can contribute to closing the gender gap in realising children's rights. This is probably influenced by my own personal experience and standpoints as I am continually constructing and reconstructing how our identities define our lives as children and adults. When I am in the field, I am captivated by the way the relationships between the boys and girls are framed by their particular gender roles and I often relate sympathetically to the girls’ struggle to be recognised as equals in their communities. Once I asked a group of girls in Jordan about their feelings of vulnerability or exclusion in relation to the difference between boys and girls. They said that they do not feel vulnerable at all and do not want to be labelled as such, but agreed that there was an ongoing fight for recognition of their abilities to participate, but this does not undermine their abilities and sense of confidence. They said they found their way to navigate this and to achieve everything they want.

This dialogue was crucial to me in building new understandings by confronting my beliefs and co-constructing shared meaning of what means to be a girl in any given society. Whilst participating in the panel discussion in Geneva, I asked Haneen the same question, and she responded that she feels empowered, confident and valued and, moreover, she does not see differences between boys and girls. One can disagree with her account, but her stand should help us to balance our perspectives to look at different angles and not just focus on the deprived position of the girls as a vulnerable group. Girls are not just defenceless individuals in need of adult protection; while protection is one of their fundamental rights, they also need to be seen as competent social actors who are able to negotiate power relationships, to interact with others and to define and redefine their own lives.

My call today is to refocus our perspectives beyond a vulnerability lens and to embrace girls’ strengths and empowerment in constructing their lives. This lens can help to promote and improve the opportunities of girls to participate equally in society and contribute to removing the traditional social norms that define their position in society in relation to imposed social identities. It is important to note that, although girls experience different challenges across diverse social contexts, the full realisation of their rights, the desire for inclusion and standing up for equality are almost identical demands from girls regardless of their age, heritage, nationality or origin. Our collective commitment should be to make those demands heard and their hopes a reality.

About the author

Dr Patricio Cuevas-Parra is the Senior Global Policy Adviser for Child Participation and Rights with World Vision International where he leads strategies and programmes to ensure that children and young people's participation are at the centre of the advocacy and policy debate. He has a keen interest in looking at cutting-edge child rights advocacy tools and models to enhance children and young people engagement in public decision-making. Patricio has been based in Social Policy at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, supported by the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR).

References

De Graeve, K. (2015) Children’s rights from a gender studies perspective: gender, intersectionality and ethic of care, The Routledge international handbook of children's rights studies, pp147-163.

James, A. and Prout, A. (1997) A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems. In: James, A. and Prout A. (Eds.) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, London: Falmer Press, pp7–34.

Konstantoni, K. and Emejulu, A. (2017) When intersectionality met childhood studies: the dilemmas of a travelling concept, Children's Geographies, 15(1), pp6-22.

O'Neill, C. and Hopkins, P. (2015) Hopkins (2015) Introduction: young people, gender and intersectionality, Gender, Place & Culture, 22(3), pp383-389.

Tisdall, E.K.M. (2017) Conceptualising children and young people’s participation: Examining vulnerability, social accountability and co-production, The International Journal of Human Rights, 21(1), pp59-75.

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[1] UN Committee on the Rights of the Child held a Day of General Discussion (DGD) in September 2018 at the UN Palais des Nations in Geneva on the theme of “Protecting and Empowering Children as Human Rights Defenders”.  The DGDs are conducted biannually to develop a deeper understanding of the content and implications of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

What does 'home' mean for children whose parents have separated?

Associate Professor Kristin Natalier from Flinders University, Australia, currently visiting CRFR provides a summary of the research she presented at a recent Informal Seminar.

 

Home is a familiar yet complex idea. Its meaning extends beyond a physical dwelling to include a feeling of comfort, a sense of control over space, connections with family and other important people, and a site in which rituals and routines create feelings of belonging. A sense of home can be important in helping people build their identity, psychological wellbeing and trust in the constancy of people and things. It follows, then, that children will likely suffer when their needs for home are overlooked. Yet so far, very little is known about children’s experiences of home when their parents separate. 

 

Failing to focus on home is a lost opportunity to address an ongoing challenge in post-separation parenting laws and processes: how to prioritise children’s, not parents’, interests when determining care arrangements. Family law and international law emphasises a child centred approach but post-separation parenting arrangements are still largely determined with reference to parents’ needs, and linked to clock and calendar time. A focus on home shifts the emphasis towards children’s feelings and experiences. It can help us to ‘stand in children’s shoes’, to borrow a phrase from Carol Smart, and see post-separation parenting arrangements from the perspective of children. It draws attention to the matters children consider necessary to create a context that allows them to feel at home, and flourish. 

 

Our initial analysis of interviews with 22 children suggest that home matters. For example, Zac described what he liked about being at his father’s house: “Just being with my dad and just having fun with him, working on my car and just doing boy things”. His comment highlighted how children can feel at home when:

 

• there was an atmosphere of ease and comfort;
• their relationships with others signalled they belonged in that space;
• they spent time with parents and other meaningful people in ways that reflected shared interests and experiences; and
• they could do and have things that mattered to them.

 

When children felt at home, their experiences might seem unremarkable. However, they are a reminder of the importance of relationships and often mundane family practices in children’s post-separation lives. The times and dates children stay with a parent were not as important as what my colleague Bruce Smyth has called ‘being in the moment time’ – those unstructured and intimate experiences that build connection with others.

 

Some children described feeling not at home at a parent’s house. An equal shared care arrangement did not allow Benjamin to build two homes; rather, it removed him from his home (his mother’s house). He said of his father’s house, “I feel like I’m on an involuntary holiday, like I’ve been taken away from my home and I don’t want to be there”. Benjamin dreaded going to his father’s house, which he found oppressive and which brought him face to face with large and unwelcome changes in how his father lived his life. His mental health and relationship with his father eroded as a result.

 

Benjamin’s parents were responsive when he talked to them about his feelings, and changed the care arrangements so that Benjamin no longer had to stay at his father’s house. His family’s emphasis moved from nights spent at each parent’s home to Benjamin connecting with his father in different ways – away from the place where he did not feel at home. Importantly for Benjamin, they developed routines and a meaningful connection that were not rooted in a place, but in an activity: football. Benjamin’s father attended every practice session and game and in doing so, rebuilt a meaningful relationship.

 

The idea of home can sensitise parents to the importance of attending to children’s lived experience of time– how they feel on a Thursday night, not whose house are they sleeping at on a Thursday night. In emphasising children’s experiences, home might decouple relationships from parental residence, and instead highlight the alternative ways and places in which meaningful relationships can be built – a sense of home, away from home.

 

 

 

Professor Belinda Fehlberg (The University of Melbourne), Associate Professor Bruce Smyth (Australian National University), and I have received funding from the Australian Research Council to explore these ideas further. We have undertaken some initial analysis (here is a summary: https://www.familylaw.co.uk/news_and_comment/children-s-experiences-of-home-after-parental-separation#.Ww6GM2eWyUk) and are about to talk to a much larger group of children and their parents about what home means when parents separate. We are aiming to understand children’s experiences of home after separation as a means of promoting new ways of attending to children’s voices when their living arrangements are decided post-parental separation.

 

 

Associate Professor Kristin Natalier

College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (Sociology), Flinders University, Australia.

Time to abandon prevalence studies of childhood sexual abuse?

CRFR Associate Researcher Dr Sarah Nelson reflects on the problematic issues around prevalence studies of childhood sexual abuse.

The wealth of prevalence studies of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) continue to display wildly differing results. Yet the impetus to carry out more studies continues, nationally and internationally. These studies are driven by the demands of commissioners and funders to ‘prove’ need before services are provided or expanded, but also by professional ambition among researchers to be the ones producing a definitive study.

Neither of these is a child-centred approach, especially when basic services – as for instance an NSPCC Scotland report recently demonstrated - remain inadequate for the minority of sexually abused children we do know about. I suggest that conventional prevalence studies are largely fruitless, and that greater accuracy about prevalence will come about as a by-product of ethical, child-centred practice against sexual abuse.

First of all, while factors like safety and confidentiality, follow-up, inclusion of stigmatised subgroups, and description of acts rather than terms like ‘abuse’ or ‘rape’ will produce more accurate survey findings, we will never approach anything like total accuracy about a secretive, often organised crime overlaid with coercion, shame and silencing.

Crucially, recent revelations, such as professional footballers in their 40s reporting abuse for the first time, support research findings that a majority of children do not tell, and sometimes never will. Officially recorded cases always understate: Stoltenborgh’s examination of hundreds of prevalence studies, for instance, found self-report rates 30 times higher than authorities’ reports. Another problem is that CSA and child sexual exploitation (CSE) overlap in their characteristics, and increasingly now in their official definitions. Do we count them together, or separately?

Even more to the point, there has never been any evidence that studies suggesting higher prevalence rates have led to any increase in services, nor to greater action against abuse. Unpalatable as this may be, public scandals exposing shameful practice have been far more likely to do so, just as they have been in other public services. For example, action against child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, Rochdale or Greater Manchester did not belatedly take place because someone conducted a prevalence study of CSE, but through exposure of disgraceful practice towards young victims.

Commissioners and funders are better directed to the results of good practice in investigation as a demonstration of significant prevalence figures. Many ‘searchlight’ or ‘snapshot’ investigations have uncovered that over decades. Back in 1984 for instance a single, active police investigation unit uncovered ten sex rings and 175 victims in one area of Leeds alone. Peter McKelvie’s proactive social work/police investigations between 1988 and 1995 closed several abusive schools and convicted dozens of perpetrators while Professor Alexis Jay’s Rotherham investigation, reported in 2014, found at least 1400 girls had been sexually exploited over 16 years.

However, ethical good practice in enabling abused children and young people to speak out may in future have the single greatest impact in uncovering a greater accuracy of prevalence. Again, it will do so as a by-product of that good practice.

 For example, the Barnahus Children’s Houses, now spreading across Europe from Scandinavia, provide a reassuring child-centred ‘one stop shop’ for enabling children to tell, for interviewing, for preparing court cases and for therapeutic work. They are being actively considered by the Scottish Government for adoption here. The Confidential Space model being piloted in several Scottish local authorities at present aims to slow the investigation process to an abused child’s pace, increase their support, and build knowledge and confidence among staff who work with young people.

There is another alternative way to persuade commissioners and funders to increase CSA/ CSE services and prevention work - to show them that while results of prevalence studies vary greatly and will continue doing so, a substantial, more consistent body of research on negative effects of abuse has demonstrated over decades that survivors are at higher risks than others of mental and physical ill health, addictions, homelessness, very young pregnancy, suicide, self-harm, offending, and distressed acting-out behaviour by young people.

 As a result of this, current costs and ‘revolving door’ usage continue to be high in many hard-pressed services - including mental and physical health, prisons, social work, addiction services and homelessness projects. Future resource savings, through investment in support and prevention projects, can thus be emphasised to funders and commissioners.

...And of course these negative effects, most of all the suffering survivors face, in themselves suggest the importance of a major investment in prevention.


This is a summary of Sarah Nelson’s presentation to the Connect 2018 conference in Cardiff, 3/5/18 (available on request). Prevalence and disclosure issues, and official statistics, are analysed in detail in Nelson, below:
Nelson (2016) Tackling Child Sexual Abuse: Radical approaches to prevention, protection & support Bristol: Policy Press, Chapter 1

Stoltenborgh M, van Ijzendoorn MH, Euser EM, Bakermans-Kranenburg MJ. (2011) ‘A global perspective on child sexual abuse: meta-analysis of prevalence around the world’, Child Maltreat. 16(2):79-101.

NSPCC (2017) The right to recover: Provision of therapeutic services in the West of Scotland for children and young people following sexual abuse  https://www.nspcc.org.uk/services-and-resources/research-and-resources/2017/right-to-recover-sexual-abuse-west-scotland/

 

 

In a search for competence? Children’s participation in family law proceedings

CRFR Co-Director Professor Kay Tisdall explores why we find it so challenging to involve children and young people in decisions that affect them.

I have been on a journey for the few past months, in terms of exploring the underlying reasons why we find it so challenging to involve children and young people in decisions that affect them. Involving children and young people is required by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and is frequently promoted by policy, institutional leaders and key practitioners. And yet adults find it so challenging when making decisions, particularly in formal decision-making about the child’s wellbeing.

In particular, I have been considering family law proceedings in Scotland. At least in legislation, Scottish provisions are very strong in terms of children’s rights to have their views duly considered in disputed parental responsibilities cases (technically Section 11 cases under the Children (Scotland) Act 1995). But from the evidence we have, children’s views seem to be even less considered now than they were ten years go. Why would that be?

One reason may be the pervasive nature of adult decision-makers’ views of children’s competence and capacity. If such a decision-maker considers children in general, and a child in particular, as incompetent and incapable, does that result in children’s views either not being ‘allowed in’ to the decision-making, let along being given ‘due weight’ by the decision-maker?

I went to look at the relevant literature and case law, supported by what evidence we have in Scotland about children’s views being considered in disputed parental responsibilities cases. I asked three questions: What are meant by competence and capacity? How are they used? Do the concepts enhance or detract from children’s participation rights?

While competence may be very well defined in certain professional arenas, it is not in key children’s rights resources (like the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s General Comment on Article 12) nor in family law literature. Competence is often mentioned – but casually, with little precision or definition. Alternative terms are used in Scottish reported case law, such as maturity. Across these sources, judging capacity remains problematic in both law and practice.

As concepts, both capacity and competence seem to be detracting rather than supporting children’s rights to participate. The concepts are being used as if competence and capacity are inherent qualities of the child, rather than something a child expresses in context and in relationships. To be honest, I am not sure if they are helpful at all, given their problematic use and historical baggage. But if these concepts are to be used, I would recommend they are subject to far more critique and precise definition. Perhaps fresh ideas from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities might help the children’s field? The Convention has been radical about moving away from a best interests test, to emphasising the support needed to ensure people can express their legal capacity.

Then the courts system would spend less effort assessing whether a child’s views should be allowed into the proceedings and more on the information children need to participate. We would have to invest in supporting children to develop and express their views. We would have a radical form of child- inclusive proceedings, where we do not use concerns about a child’s welfare as a reason to ignore the child’s rights to participate. Instead, the focus would be to make proceedings as constructive and supportive of children as possible, perhaps requiring radical changes in what are currently adversarial and formal approaches. An opportunity for us to consider in the forthcoming family law review of the 1995 Act in Scotland?

This blog is based on a longer article recently published in the International Journal of Children’s Rights, Challenging Competency and Capacity? (2018, Vol. 26(1): 159-182). This article follows on from the earlier exploration in Tisdall, E.K.M., “Subjects with Agency: Children’s participation in family law proceedings”, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 2016a (38(4)), 362–379 (see blog here) and has learnt from collaboration with Carine Le Borgne

See also our previous blog by Dr Aoife Daly ‘Prioritising Children’s Autonomy is Prioritising their Best Interests’


Kay Tisdall is Professor of Childhood Policy and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships at the University of Edinburgh. She is Programme Director of the MSc in Childhood Studies.

Children’s Participation in Decision-Making: Questioning Competence and Competencies

Carine Le Borgne asks if we need to be more challenging in recognising children’s competence to contribute to decision-making.

Children’s participation rights remain highly dependent on adults, who in one way or another, hold powerful positions such as legal guardians, administrative or political decision-makers, or front-line professionals. The attitudes of such adults towards children and childhood strongly influence whether or not the adults recognise, facilitate and support children’s participation. One of the most persistent adult concerns is whether children are competent enough to participate in decision-making. Thus, power - and particularly the power of adults - is key to children’s practical achievement of competency.

My research on children’s participation[1] at the community level highlights the challenge of adults’ perceptions of children’s competence and competencies. The research focused on why children are often seen as ‘incompetent’ and how that translates into a lack of participation. Based on the findings, in collaboration with Professor Kay Tisdall, I wrote an article on Children’s Participation: Questioning Competence and Competencies.[2]

Our article recalls the memorable phrase coined by Hinton[3] - ‘the competence bias’. This phrase captures how the use (and misuse) of a child development paradigm leads to perceiving children as starting from a position of limited competence and emphasising their evolving capacities. The ‘competence bias’ then is applied to exclude children from participation. Children’s exclusion is furthered when competence is presumed to be individualised and intrinsic, rather than recognising competency as contextual and relational.

Through my research, we trace evidence from local participation projects, of the continuing power of the competence bias. We consider how staff members can validate and enhance children’s competence and competencies, and thus recognise children’s participation rights. The analysis identifies that perceptions of children’s competence were both facilitators and inhibitors of children’s participation. The research was undertaken in Tamil Nadu (South India) and Scotland (UK), with two non-governmental organisations (NGO) supporting children’s participation.

The research highlights the key role of NGO staff members in contributing to children’s social competence. The NGO activities in this research increased children’s knowledge, which they not only used in their communities but were able to transfer to school and family contexts. The NGO staff members were key to providing the link between children and adult decision-makers in their communities, though this was done less successfully in Scotland than in Tamil Nadu.

The findings also indicate that, without NGO support, children were limited in expressing their social competence. This leads to two conclusions. First, strengthening the role of the staff members in children’s participation is worthwhile because they can play key roles in developing and validating children’s competence and enhancing children’s competencies. Staff members’ own perceptions of children’s competences and competencies influence how well they support children and children’s influence on decision-making.

Second, the competence bias remains pernicious and often unhelpful to children’s participation. The bias can mean that participation workers, as key intermediaries, may be necessary to facilitate children’s participation rights. It may also mean that children’s competencies are under-recognised, as children only achieve participation through ‘borrowing’ NGO power and not power or influence in their own right.

All this leads us to conclude - do we need to be more challenging yet in recognising children’s competence to contribute to decision-making?

Carine Le Borgne was an affiliated PhD Student with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR) and is now Senior Policy Adviser at World Vision UK. Kay Tisdall is Programme of the MSc in Childhood Studies[4] at The University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of CRFR.


References

1 https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/21025/CRFR%20Briefing%2087.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

2 https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/986

3 http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/157181808x311141

4 http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/gradschool/prospective/taught_masters/a_g/msc_childhood_studies

 

Prioritising Children’s Autonomy is Prioritising their Best Interests

Dr Aoife Daly argues that when judges make decisions about children’s best interests in courts, they often think that they are protecting children by taking decision-making from them, but this fails to acknowledge that children are experts on their own lives.

In my recently-published book Children, Autonomy and the Courts: Beyond the Right to be Heard, I look at cases where courts decide children’s best interests (for example about parental contact) to see how much influence children themselves have on decisions. I examine cases from liberal democracies all over the world and 11 countries in detail, including Scotland, England and Wales.

It seems that children in these cases find their wishes easily overridden. Common decisions from around the world include children being forced into contact visits with estranged parents (sometimes with the threat that the police or court staff will physically force them). In one case a 16 year old was not allowed to give video testimony in care proceedings; and in another a 15 year old was compelled to have inoculations against her will because her father wanted it. Compare these scenarios to adult ones: adults are never forced into relationships or non-essential medical procedures ‘in their interests’.

The instinct of adults, including judges making best interest decisions, is to protect children. This approach is well-intentioned and it recognises rightly that children’s capacities are developing and that they are lacking in experience relative to adults. They may need time, support and information to form an opinion. Sometimes they might not want to give an opinion at all and that should be respected too.

Yet in many cases, children have unmistakable wishes about a situation. An inquest opened recently into the murder of Ellie Butler. The six year old had been living almost all of her life with her grandparents, but was sent by a family court in 2013 to live with her violent father though it seems that she had begged not to be returned. She was beaten to death by him within a year. Adults often ignore that children might well understand their own best interests. It can be very difficult for children to be taken seriously when their wishes incline against strong societal assumptions, such as the need to prioritise the position of birth parents. Younger children find it particularly challenging to get adults to take their views seriously.

I argue in 'Children, Autonomy and the Courts' that it is illogical and unjustifiable that children do not have greater influence in court decisions determining their best interests. In liberal democracies, autonomy is held as the most important characteristic for the individual. It is prioritised in medical law for example, and increasingly is upheld to the extent possible for adults with cognitive disability (which demonstrates that decreased ‘capacity’ need not prevent prioritisation of someone’s wishes). Yet judges can make decisions about children without having to prioritise autonomy. Children’s wishes can be treated as just another factor and overridden with ease.

In my book I argue that a ‘right to be heard’ does not go far enough for children. I propose that a children’s autonomy principle, respecting children’s wishes unless significant harm would likely result, would ensure greater support for children in proceedings, and greater obligations on adults to engage in transparent decision-making. It would also mean better best interest decisions, because it is only by giving appropriate priority to children’s own wishes that we can make good decisions on their behalf.


Dr Aoife Daly is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at The University of Liverpool. She has worked and researched widely on children's rights and has held a number of NGO and academic positions. She also has teaching and research interests in a number of other areas including family law and civil and political rights. She researches human rights issues through the lenses of social justice, gender and psychology.

Resilience in early years—continuing the conversation

Dr Caralyn Blaisdell continues our discussion on the theme of resilience and how this term is being used.

“We like to think of childhood as a time of joy and innocence—for many of us it’s just not true.”

…so opens the trailer for the Resilience documentary, an American film currently touring through the children’s sector in Scotland. The film is a public service announcement dealing with the “biology of stress and the science of hope”. It explores the ways that exposure to trauma, particularly during childhood, affects a person’s whole being, and looks at associations with future health outcomes. Research suggests that prolonged stress is associated with poorer health outcomes in childhood and adulthood. The film specifically focuses on the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study but resonates with a wider body of research—for example, hypotheses about the ‘weathering’ effects on health of chronic stressors such as racism.

The tagline for the film is ‘the biology of stress and the science of hope’. It is perhaps the ‘hope’ elements of the documentary that are particularly important to interrogate. The film is from a US context and - perhaps unsurprisingly, given its origin - focuses largely on individualised remedies. These are important. But the documentary does not spend much time questioning how inequalities come about on a structural level. For example, the film looks at an intervention that involves drama therapists listening to children about their lived experiences. But why is this such a departure? Why do we not already create space for children’s voices and seek out their perspectives—and believe them? The film does not unpack children’s subordination and the institutional practices that silence them. It’s sad, but not surprising, that we need reminding that children are human beings with complex lives and relationships.

At Strathclyde University, the initial feedback from students who have seen the Resilience documentary suggests they see a role for themselves. From vowing to avoid making their classroom stressful for children, to understanding that ‘bad behaviour’ may not be about children being naughty, but instead stem from stress, to making a commitment to be brave and ask children about what worries them, the students are thinking about how their own practice might create a more just experience for children. For example, how do early years professionals deal with racist incidents in the playroom? Do we gloss them over in the name of being ‘nice’ and ‘all being friends’ (Konstantoni, 2013)? Are teachers aware of the structural causes of poverty and the ways poverty impacts on school life (Kustatscher, 2017; Treanor, 2017)? Do early years professionals have an understanding of how cultural, political and legal contexts shape the choices that are available to children and families, and their sense of belonging in country and community (Tillett and Wong, 2017)?

In previous CRFR blogs about resilience, the authors have asked us to consider who is responsible for resilience. Are we cheering when children and young people successfully ‘steel’ themselves against a deeply unfair society, or are we going to look at our own contributions to dealing them a better hand, as Ariane Critchley asks? Remedies for resilience, such as mindfulness, are increasingly popular in early years, but we need to ask ourselves WHY environments are stressful for children and how we can change our own ways of working.


Caralyn Blaisdell is a Lecturer in Early Years Education at the University of Strathclyde. She completed her PhD at CRFR on ‘Young children’s participation as a living right: an ethnographic study of an early learning and childcare setting’. 

References

Konstantoni, K. (2013) ‘Children’s rights-based approaches: the challenges of listening to taboo/discriminatory issues and moving beyond children’s participation’, International Journal of Early Years Education, 21(4), pp. 362–374. doi: 10.1080/09669760.2013.867169.

Kustatscher, M. (2017) ‘Young children’s social class identities in everyday life at primary school: The importance of naming and challenging complex inequalities’, Childhood, 24(3), pp. 381–395. doi: 10.1177/0907568216684540.

Tillett, V. and Wong, S. (2017) ‘An investigative case study into early childhood educators’ understanding about “belonging”’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 0(0), pp. 1–13. doi: 10.1080/1350293X.2018.1412016.

Treanor, M. (2017) Can we put the ‘poverty of aspiration’ myth to bed now? CRFR briefing 91. Available at: https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/25787/CRFR%20briefing%2091%20-%20Treanor.pdf

How resilient do we want our children and young people to be?

In a follow-up post, CRFR Associate PhD student Ariane Critchley provides her thoughts on resilience in response to the recent CRFR Seminar ‘The Troubling Concept of Resilience’ given by Eric Carlin and Emma Davidson.


As a social worker I was fortunate to meet a number of children and young people who I would describe as ‘resilient’. The work of Gilligan (2001) was highly influential on my practice and I considered ways in which I might foster resilience in the children I worked with, particularly those children to whom we owed corporate parenting responsibilities, by virtue of their status as ‘looked after’. In my view, it makes sense to talk of ‘resilience’ in the context of frontline social work, where practitioners encounter young people who have suffered 'extraordinary vulnerability’ (Brownlie, 2014: 195) through their experiences of early trauma, their separation from family of origin, and experiences of an imperfect care system with multiple moves of home and school. Should young people flourish through such extremes of early adversity, aren’t we right to think of them as resilient?

I would argue that in this context, ‘resilient’ is exactly how we should describe the ongoing achievement that individual children make by not only surviving serious challenges, but somehow finding a way to grow and to thrive. And the ‘somehow’ here is crucial. Acknowledging Carlin & Davidson’s challenge, that resilience risks that we ‘prioritise external and normative judgements about individuals’ characteristics and behaviours and the adversities they are deemed to have overcome’ (Ungar, 2005), I wish to suggest that resilience as properly understood is an ecological and ‘relational’ quality (Bondi et al. 2007). We can only be resilient to the challenges we face through interaction with the internal and external factors that make up our life world. For example, our health, the people who surround us, the socio-economic context we live in, and the resources to which we have access. Resilience then, is not a ‘characteristic’ so much as a process.

Which is why, as social workers, we feel we can contribute to an individual child or young person’s overall ‘resilience’. However, this does not translate into a policy aspiration that all children and young people should be resilient. Listening to the seminar last week, what struck me was the way that the universal application of concepts such as ‘resilience’ can be dangerous. When youth policy suggests through GIRFEC that all Scottish children should be encouraged to be resilient we risk a backwards misapplication, which seems to demand that children and young people do their best with the cards they are dealt rather than our society finding them a better hand.

In their study of the operationalisation of resilience in practice, Daniel et al. cautioned that, ‘policy documents are increasingly referring to the promotion of resilience as an aim – it is important that such documents set out their operational definitions (Daniel et al., 2009)’. Viewing resilience ‘as an aim’ introduces the great danger that this seminar warned of; we might expect that children and young people encountering significant difficulty should simply become more resilient, flipping resilience on its head in a way that demands individual overcoming, not structural equalising. If resilience is understood as a dynamic process that occurs in conditions of adversity, the aim of public policy should surely be to challenge and reduce the social and material conditions in which children can truly be described as ‘resilient’, to decrease the very circumstances in which resilience can flourish.

Ariane Critchley is a qualified social worker and researcher with a range of interests across social work and public health. Ariane is based at the University of Edinburgh where she is writing up her ESRC funded PhD on pre-birth child protection, examining the complexities of applying child protection processes to unborn children and the experiences of practitioners and of expectant families. Ariane has contributed to Scottish Government publications on maternity care and is currently working with Social Work Scotland on finding evidence of good practice in the implementation of self-directed support in Scotland.


References


Bondi, L., Davidson, J. and Smith, M. (2007), ‘Geography’s ‘Emotional Turn’’, Chapter 1 in Davidson, J. Bondi, L. and Smith, M. (2007), Emotional Geographies, Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate.

Brownlie, J. (2014), Ordinary Relationships. A Sociological Study of Emotions, Reflexivity and Culture, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

 Daniel, B, Vincent, S, Farrell, E & Amey, F (2009), 'How is the concept of resilience operationalised in practice with vulnerable children?' International Journal of Child and Family Welfare, vol. 12 (1): 2-21.

Gilligan, R. (2001), Promoting resilience : a resource guide on working with children in the care system, London: British Agencies for Adoption & Fostering (BAAF).

Ungar, M. (2005) ‘Introduction: Resilience across cultures and contexts’, in Handbook for working with children and youth. London: Sage.

Resilience – continuing the conversation

Emma Davidson and Eric Carlin reflect on their recent CRFR Informal Seminar

It’s not a surprise that our seminar, ‘The Troubling Concept of Resilience’, received such interest. In recent years, fostering resilience has become a central dimension not only of early years, education and youth policy, but wider social policy and practice. The concept has, arguably, come from a sensible place: research that has sought to understand why, and in what circumstances, some individuals respond positively to adversity, and others do not. Our wariness, possibly scepticism, is about how resilience has been endorsed and appropriated by the state, distorting the policy focus away from the need for structural changes to reduce entrenched long-term and complex inequalities across populations and instead focussing on ‘steeling’ young people to bounce back from adversities that are assumed to be unavoidable.

 As we highlighted at the seminar, criticism of resilience projects has focused on their prioritisation of understanding and influencing individual behaviours, reducing risk factors for individuals and, in turn, neglecting social and structural explanations failure. Resilience based interventions are evolving, and a body of work is adopting a socio-ecological model which takes account of cultural contexts (see Hart et al 2016 or Ungar, M 2008). However, the psychoanalytical tradition from which resilience has developed dominates, with its focus on psychological dispositions and personality traits of individuals as ‘protective factors’. We are also troubled that our understandings of resilience are, to a great extent, being ‘imported’ from other social and cultural contexts, and we note the growth of a commercial industry of facilitators, consultants and trainers to support the policy drift towards resilience.

Of course, we are not suggesting that work on young people’s self-esteem, confidence and mental well-being is not important. However, we would argue that there is a need to stop and reflect – to think critically about how we are defining and operationalising resilience; to examine the evidence on resilience within our local contexts; to consider whether resilience is the outcome desired for your project; and to campaign for effective policies that can reduce unnecessary disadvantages.

Our final question is a bigger one – and that is whether the resilience framework is actually fit for purpose? Can a resilience framework transform fundamental inequalities marginalising young people, such as inequity in the education system, access to housing and welfare and precarious employment? Is this focus on ‘steeling’ young people - making them stronger and more resistant to adversity, and personally responsible for ‘success’ or ‘failure’ - socially just? This question is all the more potent in a climate of austerity, where many adversities facing young people cannot be considered a consequence of their own deficits.

These are questions, and conversations, we would like to continue. Follow this blog for ongoing debate and an announcement about a future seminar to continue the discussions.


Dr Emma Davidson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Sociology, based at the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships. Her ongoing research is exploring the social and community role of public libraries in Scotland (https://anewpage.org).

Dr Eric Carlin is a Teaching Fellow in the Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics and is the Director of Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems (SHAAP) based at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
References

Hart, A. et al. (2016) ‘Uniting Resilience Research and Practice With an Inequalities Approach’ SAGE Open, 6(4): 1-13.

Ungar, M. (2008) ‘Resilience across Cultures’, The British Journal of Social Work, 38(2):218–235.

Supporting children and families in early childhood: When does community action let the Government off the hook?

CRFR Associate Researcher, Dr Kate McAlpine works in Tanzania at the intersection between good governance, technology and children’s rights. In this post she reflects on the key findings from a qualitative study that evaluated the impacts of Children in Crossfire’s[i] programme of integrated child development interventions for children in the early years.


In Tanzania too many people live hand to mouth, as deep and shallow poverty exist side by side. The prevailing belief is that children unite a family, but that they should defer to adults. Until recently young children have been considered by the Government to be the responsibility of the family and not a group that warrants any services beyond health care. 

The main concern of the programme we evaluated was to mitigate the effects of poverty on children’s developmental outcomes, and to do so by increasing young children’s access to early years education. The programme did this by equipping community volunteers to run community based early years centres; and establishing micro-finance funds for women to help finance the centres.

Using a narrative approach that sought out people’s stories; we inquired about parents’ and early years educators’ internal capacities to protect and nurture children. We also investigated the attitudes and behaviours of the Local Government Authorities with regards to investing in services for young children; and sought out changes in familial and community relationships. The interviews were coded and analysed using the classic grounded theory method. 

We discovered that individuals who have been touched by the programme are now ready to parent. But, punitive parenting continues to be prevalent in the communities. Parents and local leaders who were interviewed believe that the early years educators are “true teachers” even though they have learnt on the job. Parents hear that the early years services are good; their children want to attend; and then parents see their child thrive.

Notably, community members are self-organizing to undertake development initiatives that benefit children. Unexpectedly, social capital has been strengthened as a result of the establishment of community managed micro funds that were initially intended to provide funding to the early years centres.

The success of the programme raises wider questions about the planning and financing of social services when communities have initiated their own services. The programme had a working assumption that the early years centres would be legitimized via a process of Government supervision, regulation, and resourcing. However, the minimum standards for centres that were developed by the Government are not fit for purpose. This is because they frame quality in terms of infrastructure and processes, and ignore standards around safety. Nor, is the Government fully invested in resourcing the regulation of early years centres.

Many community members see the value of contributing to early years education, and ward officials recognise that early years and child protection services need financing. But, this does not translate into revenue. Planning to resource services is a completely different thing from delivering services, and children’s services continue to be treated as a matter of charity.

Long-standing systemic impact for young children can only be achieved if neighbourhood leaders (both public servants and elected officials) self-identify as agents of change; if a social consensus emerges that services for children need to be resourced by the government; and finally if citizens and leaders learn how to navigate the Government mechanisms for participatory planning and budgeting, and consistently put pressure on the government to resource children’s services. 


The full research report can be downloaded at http://www.doingtherightthing.co/publications/

 [i] Children in Crossfire is an Irish International NGO that furthers early years education and development in Tanzania. https://www.childrenincrossfire.org/


References


Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). Discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago: Aldine de Gruyter.


McAlpine, K & Omesa, Njeri (2017) A Qualitative Evaluation of the Impacts of a Programme of Integrated Child Development in Tanzania. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Children in Crossfire.

Monitoring compliance with Article 12: Council of Europe Assessment Tool

This post by Gerison Lansdown was originally published on the Together blog and is reproduced here with their permission. Gerison Lansdown is an international expert on children and young people’s participation. She is the founder director 1992-2000 of the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, and has also worked with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on several general comments including on Article 12. 

Following her presentation at ‘UNCRC in Practice’, the second seminar of the ‘UNCRC in Scotland’ series¹, we are delighted to welcome Gerison Lansdown to CRFR to lead the workshop ‘Children and Young People’s Participation: how do we know if it is making a difference?’ In this workshop, she will be covering toolkits for monitoring and evaluating children’s participation and introducing a Child Participation Assessment Tool, developed by the Council of Europe.

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Prior to the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1989, children’s rights were primarily defined in terms of protection. The inclusion of Article 12 in the CRC transformed the status of children from passive recipients of adult protection and care, to active agents entitled to engage in decisions and actions affecting their lives. The Committee on the Rights of the Child developed a General Comment on Article 12 in 2009, which identified it as not only a human right but also ‘one of the fundamental values of the Convention’, and a general principle to be considered in the interpretation and implementation of all other rights. The Committee recognises Article 12, together with the other civil and political rights addressing respect for evolving capacities, freedom of expression, thought, conscience and religion, association, and to privacy and information (arts. 5, 13, 14, 5, 16, 17), as a package of rights that can be conceptualised as ‘participation’, although the term itself does not appear in the text of any of these articles.

However, although significant investment has been made over the past 26 years in exploring how to translate Article 12 into practice, surprisingly little progress has been made, until recently, in the development of concrete indicators against which to hold States to account in fulfilling their obligations to children under Article 12. The Council of Europe has now stepped into this breach with the introduction of its Child Participation Assessment Tool, which has been fully endorsed by member States of the Council. This Tool elaborates 10 indicators which identify the measures States need to undertake in order to make Article 12 a reality, and against which they can be held to account. It is accompanied by comprehensive guidance on how to undertake the assessment and who needs to be involved.

The indicators fall into three broad clusters:

1) Measures to protect the right to participate

• Legal protection for children’s right to participate is reflected in the national Constitution and legislation.
• Explicit inclusion of child participation in a cross-sectoral national strategy to implement children’s rights.
• An independent children’s rights institution is in place and protected by law.
• Existence of mechanisms to enable children to exercise their right to participate safely in judicial and administrative proceedings.
• Child friendly complaints procedures are in place.

2) Measures to promote awareness of the right to participate

• Children’s right to participate in decision-making is embedded in training programmes for professionals working with and for children.
• Children are provided with information about their right to participate in decision-making.

3) Measures to create spaces for participation

• Children are represented in forums, including through their own organisations, at school, local, regional and national governance level.
• Child-targeted feedback mechanisms on public services are in place.
• Children are supported to participate in the monitoring of the UNCRC and CRC shadow reporting, and relevant CoE instruments and conventions.

The Child Participation Assessment Tool, with its accompanying guidance, provides a rigorous framework through which to review and strengthen the existing environment in respect of children and young people’s participation rights. It can be used to enhance advocacy for greater compliance, and hold the Scottish Government to account on its commitments to the right of children and young people in Scotland to have their voices heard and taken seriously in all arenas of their lives. This represents a significant opportunity. If fully implemented, Article 12 would represent one of the most profound transformations in moving towards a culture of respect for adolescents’ rights, for their dignity and citizenship and for their capacities to contribute significantly towards their own well-being.

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¹The ‘UNCRC in Scotland’ series consists of four seminars held in partnership between Together, the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships and the Centre for Child Wellbeing and Protection at the University of Stirling. It seeks to improve — and address gaps — in the implementation and monitoring of the UNCRC in Scotland.

Find out more about ‘the UNCRC in Scotland’ seminar series and access materials here.

Expanding our ideas of childhood and children’s participation in decision making

CRFR co-director Professor Kay Tisdall asks, why do so many children and young people find it difficult to have their views given due consideration, in matters that affect them?

Children and young people’s participation is key principle embedded within the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child. The Convention was ratified in 1989 –twenty-seven years ago – and it is the most ratified of any international human right treaty (only the USA has not yet ratified it). We know of notable initiatives, at national and local levels. But children and young people’s participation rights are still not consistently respected.

I had the chance to publish two journal articles in the past month, on children and young people’s participation. In some ways they are very different. One deals with children’s participation in family law proceedings in Scotland. The second considers children’s participation in child protection, including international child protection in humanitarian settings. But both have similar conclusions: that we need to expand our ideas of childhood and children’s participation, beyond concerns about their vulnerability and requirements for autonomous agency, to change how we both perceive and organise decision-making that impacts on children and young people.

In the first article, Subjects with agency? Children’s participation in family law proceedings, I investigate current and recent trends in family law proceedings in Scotland. Children’s participation has been institutionalised in Scottish primary and secondary legislation, as well as procedures. But it is limited because children’s views tend to be accepted only if they are judged to be rational, autonomous and consistent. If their views are considered irrational, manipulated or distressed, their views are given less weight. This misses that children are likely to be emotional at times of parental separation and divorce, and that over lengthy court proceedings, their views may well change. Concerns about children’s vulnerability increasingly results in them being excluded from courts themselves. I conclude that courts and their decisions may be child-focused in Scotland, centring on children’s welfare, but they tend not to be child-inclusive, involving children in decision-making.

Are there alternative ways of perceiving children and young people’s participation, which could assist? My second article, Conceptualising children and young people’s participation, considered three popular concepts. These are:

• ‘vulnerability’ (i.e. what would the world look like, if we recognised that all people were vulnerable?),
• ‘social accountability’ (i.e. civic engagement to hold duty-bearers to account), and
• ‘co-production’ (i.e. involving lay people in designing and delivering services or research).

All three seek transformative relationships between the State and service users, that are more emancipatory and address power. Would one of these provide a very promising alternative?

By the end of my exploration, I find that vulnerability and social accountability have their contribution but still place children and childhood as especially vulnerable and then fail to adequately question adult power. Co-production, both on paper and when looking at recent local and international practices, has potential. It is co-production’s (re)claiming of children and young people’s expertise and knowledge that distinguishes itself from vulnerability and social accountability and makes it promising as a way to perceive and promote participation.

We know children and young people can influence decisions that affect them. There are many examples where practice and structures have improved, and initiatives have been developed. But we need to break through the familiar list of challenges, to find meaningful, effective and sustainable ways to recognise children and young people’s rights to participate.



Articles

Tisdall, E.K.M. (2016) ‘Conceptualising children and young people’s participation: examining vulnerability, social accountability and co-production’ International Journal of Human Rights 10.1080/13642987.2016.1248125

Tisdall, E.K.M. (2016) ‘Subjects with agency? Children’s participation in family law proceedings’, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Lawn, 38(4): 362-379. 10.1080/09649069.2016.1239345

Further information

For further information about CRFR’s programme of work on children and young people’s participation, see our partnership with Young Edinburgh Action and our support for the IMPACT project.

Professor Kay Tisdall and Dr Susan Elsley deliver a two-day continuing professional development course Developing innovative research with children and young people. The course is an opportunity for researchers and others working with children and young people to explore the latest methods and debates in childhood and youth research. Further information can be found on the CRFR website

Involving children and young people in research and consultation: lessons learned from Scotland

Sara Lembrechts, of the Children’s Rights Knowledge Centre (KeKi) in Ghent, Belgium, attended our series of continuing professional development (CPD) courses exploring research with children and young people last year. In this post, Sara reflects on her time with us in Edinburgh and what she took away from the course and implemented in her day-to-day work back home.

In Spring 2015, my colleague and I attended the CPD “Involving children and young people in research and consultation” with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships. In three times two days, dr. Susan Elsley and prof. Kay Tisdall guided us through the do’s and don’ts of meaningful and ethical participation of children and young people in research and policy making. The programme was a success – it stimulated our critical perspective on innovative creative and digital methods, made us become aware and question the assumptions that implicitly guide our work, and encouraged us to return to Belgium with a whole set of new ideas to implement.

The course conveners managed superbly well in creating a welcoming and comfortable environment in which interaction with the small group of participants was only natural. We have benefited greatly from the knowledge and experience of fellow researchers, practitioners, youth workers, artists, TED-speakers, poets, academic writers, resource persons and – last but not least – the children who joined us with their views and tips & tricks throughout the programme. The invitation to be creative and go digital ourselves was refreshing, as it opened our mind to new resources we were previously unfamiliar with. What is our own image of childhood, and how does it influence our work? How do you make sure participation is not tokenistic? How can we use the arts or digital media as a “way in” to get in touch with young people? How do you translate creative output into data?

The debate about such questions has indeed proven its great use in our day-to-day work at the Flemish Children’s Rights Knowledge Centre (in Dutch Kenniscentrum Kinderrechten vzw, abbreviated as KeKi). Operational since 2010, KeKi aims to gather, make available, disseminate, stimulate and increase knowledge on children’s rights. As such, KeKi operates as a bridge between (1) researchers from a wide range of academic disciplines, (2) policy makers in local, regional and federal government, and (3) practitioners working on matters concerning youth and children’s rights. In this role, KeKi develops tools, trainings and content that encourage critical reflection and can, at the same time, help in translating knowledge on children’s rights to these diverse domains (see www.keki.be/en).

One example in which we were able to implement what we had learned in Edinburgh, is a policy advice we recently wrote for the Flemish Government Administration on child participation in (local) policy making. We were asked to collect good practices, in particular on how to involve vulnerable youth (including children in poverty, children with disabilities and children in institutional care) in local and regional (i.e. Flemish) policymaking. Using the resources Susan and Kay had generously made available, we were able to show Flemish policy makers what they could learn from their colleagues abroad and hint at the tips and tricks we learned from everyone we met in Scotland.

Thanks to all who contributed in making our stay in Edinburgh so relevant and inspirational!

CRFR’s next CPD course Involving children and young people in research and consultation takes place in March and there are a limited number of spaces available. For further information and booking details, please visit: www.crfr.ac.uk/eventsandtraining/training/cpd-training/involving-children-young-people/

Harmonising the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with children’s rights

By Patricio Cuevas-Parra, Senior Policy Adviser on Child Participation and Rights at World Vision International and CRFR PhD candidate.

For those working in international development, September 2015 marks a major milestone in the fight toward the eradication of poverty worldwide as the United Nations adopted the post-2015 development agenda. During its 69th session, the General Assembly agreed on the new global framework 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This agenda included 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, which cover issues ranging from hunger and food security to climate change and sustainable ecosystems.

Over the past three years, a large number of children’s rights advocates and child-focused organisations engaged in intense consultations and negotiations with multiple parties, including governmental agencies, multilaterals, and civil society and private sector organisations. They sought to ensure SDGs were inclusive of children and their rights. Their efforts were successful. The adoption of the SDGs embodies, in the text, much human rights language, recognises children and young people as subjects of rights, and acknowledges the obligation to achieve progressively the full realisation of their rights.

As someone who has worked on children’s participation in different parts of the world, I was personally pleased to see a clear commitment to the realisation of children’s rights. I was also satisfied to read multiple mentions made of the right to participate in the declaration of the adoption of the 2030 Agenda. The SDGs underline the importance of the empowerment and engagement of children and young people as critical agents of change that should be able to participate fully in society.Nevertheless, many questions remain open. How will children’s rights be unpacked? How will the potential tension between child-wellbeing and child rights be addressed? How can we ensure that children and young people are able to participate in the implementation and monitoring of this global framework?

The SDGs have embraced a general human rights language, which is a major step forward; however, the core set of global issues affecting children have not completely been framed in relation to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The discussion on favouring child well-being over children’s rights has also raise some concerns. For instance, there is a preoccupation that a focus on child well-being can undermine the obligations for States Parties have ratified the UNCRC.

For Tisdall (2015), children’s well-being and children’s rights are not equivalent concepts. The former underlines a preventive and asset-based approach, which is aspirational, but can be apolitical. On the other hand, children’s rights are a set of agreed upon minimum standards where the States Parties that have ratified the UNCRC, as the main duty bearers, can be held accountable to realise those rights. So, the harmonisation of the SDGs with children’s rights requires the States Parties develop a robust connection between the targets and the agreed upon set of non-negotiable UNCRC standards, especially in accordance with its core principles of non-discrimination, the best interest of children, the right to life, survival and development and the respect for the views of children.

The SDGs seek to realise the human rights of all and call to respect these rights. However, experiences from the field have shown that children and young people still face age-based discrimination and, as a result of that, they are excluded from decision-making processes. Moosa-Mitha (2005) argues that children will often be excluded if they are considered as ‘equality-as-same’ instead of being treated as ‘differently equal members of the public culture in which they are full participants.’ I believe that this difference-centre approach can help children and young people to exercise their citizen rights on the basis of their identity as children, and prevent them from being excluded solely on the basis of their age.

My final thoughts are around the promises made by SDGs to create spaces and opportunities for children and young people to participate in the global agenda. The member states at Rio + 20 also called to ensure the active participation of children and young people in decision-making processes and in monitoring and accountability. Writing from a UK context, Tisdall (2008) argues that one of the major tasks in ensuring children’s and young people’s participation is to change institutions to a position where they are able to include children and young people as stakeholders in decision-making. The SDGs have recognised children and young people as critical agents of change and asked them to actively engage in shaping their world. This is a very promising approach that has been widely applauded by children’s rights advocates, however, it is also brings several questions. How do the international community and other key actors incorporate children and young people’s participation in global strategies, policies and legislation and; more importantly, what do children and young people think about that?

If you would like to learn more about the SDGs, check out these sites: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/
http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/SDGs-child-friendly.pdf
http://www.wvi.org/united-nations-and-global-engagement/article/world-visions-commentary-open-working-groups-proposed

References
- Moosa-Mitha, M. (2005) A Difference-Centred Alternative to Theorization of Children's Citizenship Rights, Citizenship Studies, 9 (4), pp. 369-388, DOI:10.1080/13621020500211354
- Tisdall, K. (2008) 'Is the honeymoon over? Children and young people’s participation in public decision-making' International Journal of Children’s Rights, 16 (3), pp. 343-354.
- Tisdall, K. (2015) Children’s rights and children’s wellbeing: Equivalent policy concepts? Journal of Social Policy, 44 (4), pp. 807-823, 10.1017/S0047279415000306.
- United Nations (2015) Transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development, A/RES/70/1, retrieved 10 November 2015 from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for%20Sustainable%20Development%20web.pdf

Patricio Cuevas-Parra's CRFR PhD project ‘All opinions matter: Children and young people leading their own research’ aims to critically explore how the process and outcomes of the participation of children and young people in their own research contribute, positively or negatively, to decision-making processes.

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Do you want to develop your skills in research and consultation with children and young people? Take a look at our Continuing Professional Development courses, delivered by Dr Susan Elsley and Professor Kay Tisdall:

10-11th March 2016: Involving children and young people in research and consultation
28-29th April 2016: Using creative methods in research with children and young people

Children's rights and wellbeing

Kay Tisdall, CRFR co-director

How do children’s rights and children’s wellbeing fit together? I became concerned about this in 2012. The Government proposed new legislation, in Scotland, promising ‘to make rights real’ for children. And the Government said it would legislate for ‘Getting it Right for Every Child’ (GIRFEC), so that the initiative was fully implemented across Scotland. GIRFEC seeks to improve how professionals and agencies work together, encouraging prevention and early intervention with children and their families. GIRFEC is outcomes-based, organised around 8 children’s wellbeing indicators. With both children’s rights and children’s wellbeing placed in the same legislation, an intellectual interest – how do the two concepts fit together? – became a practical policy concern.

Over the next 3 years, I have worked with colleagues, the Common Weal, and then colleagues in Europe and North America, to work out how the concepts are similar and different. If there are differences, do the differences matter? After all, children’s rights can fit into children’s wellbeing; children’s wellbeing can fit into children’s rights.

In the article just published in the Journal of Social Policy, I suggest that the time is past for casually pairing children’s rights and children’s wellbeing. Children’s rights and children’s wellbeing are distinct concepts, each with their own historical, philosophical and practical strengths and weaknesses. Children’s wellbeing benefits from being aspirational and maximising. It can easily incorporate children’s relationships and collective needs. Researchers have developed advanced quantitative methods of measurement, attractive for outcomes-based indicators. But children’s wellbeing risks being apolitical, utilitarian and professionally-led in both measurement and practice. Children’s rights, in contrast, emphasise minimum standards, do not easily include such important matters for children like love and friendship, and has had limited investment in quantitative measures to date. Children’s rights can be accused of over-emphasising individual autonomy and thus antithetical to more collective cultures around the world. Yet, children’s rights are powerful politically, backed by law and hold duty-bearers to account.

Melton claimed in 2014 that ‘the most fundament need in child policy is for due respect towards children as people’. Children’s rights require and underline such respect for children. It is possible for children’s wellbeing to include children’s rights. But this is not essential to how children’s wellbeing is conceptualised, measured or implemented. I thus favour children’s rights, at least for Scotland, where we still have so much to argue for: from children’s access to justice, to unacceptably high and increasing levels of child poverty, to urban estates replete with ‘no ball games’ signs on unused grass.

With children’s wellbeing on the national and international ascendance, a decision needs to be made about whether wellbeing or human rights best frame policy and practice. In Scotland – if only to rationalise dual planning tracks and other confusing policy requirements – we certainly need to do so.

Tisdall, E. K.M. (2015) 'Children’s Rights and Children’s Wellbeing: Equivalent Policy Concepts?' Journal of Social Policy, vol 44, no. 4, pp. 807-823., 10.1017/S0047279415000306

Melton, G. (2014) ‘ ‘Because it’s the right (or wrong) thing to do’: when children’s wellbeing is the wrong outcome’, in Ben-Arieh, A., Casas, F., Frones, I. and Korbin, J. (eds) Handbook of Child Well-Being, Dordrecht: Springer.

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Do you want to develop your skills in research and consultation with children and young people? Take a look at our Continuing Professional Development courses, delivered by Dr Susan Elsley and Professor Kay Tisdall:

10-11th March 2016: Involving children and young people in research and consultation
28-29th April 2016: Using creative methods in research with children and young people