6 - Youth Citizens

Summary

In the Introduction (Chapter 1), I discussed the link between children's participation and children's status as citizens. Citizens are persons who are able and are given the opportunity to participate in decisions that affect their lives and the lives of their communities. These participatory opportunities can be written into the law, through formal rights to participation. They can also be created in interactions between children and adults. Thus, child protection professionals are in a position where they can help engender children's fully-fledged citizenship status by promoting their participation in their interactions with them. Child protection caseworkers make very important decisions about children's lives, including removal from home into out-of-home care, the type of out-of-home care and other services a child, young person and family need to keep the child safe. In this chapter I show that study participants view and often treat youths as citizens by providing them with opportunities for consultative, if not collaborative or child-led, participation.

As Chapter 4 showed, many of the study participants stated that the extent to which they involved teenagers differed from younger children: teens were more likely to participate in decisions about removal, foster placements, parental visits, and reunification. The threshold between the children who obtained information but could not decide and those who were consulted and whose statements and opinions were taken seriously appeared to be the cusp of adolescence. The average age of the children who participants mentioned when they described situations in which the child's opinion significantly mattered was 12.6 years for Norway and 13 years for California. This chapter builds on this finding and focuses on the study participants’ perceptions of and experiences with involving teenagers. In what ways did they involve teens differently from younger children? What did they perceive as the challenges when involving teens? How did they resolve these challenges? The analysis for this chapter shows that participants in both countries conceptualized teens as children who possess power – they described them as defiant, rebellious, and resisting interventions.