KEY LEARNING POINTS
• The notion of participation is important from both a child rights and a child development perspective.
• Participation can promote child and adolescent development and can enhance decision-making about young people
• It is important to consider cultural factors and gender issues when planning to develop child participation in programming
• Child and adolescent participation can be difficult and complex to implement in some contexts. Clarity of objectives and methods, and careful consideration of areas of difficulty will greatly facilitate effective implementation.
•
It is important to avoid tokenistic participation.
Participation requires a real commitment by the adults who are working with
young people to ensure that the principle of participation is embedded within
the programme.
Topic 2 emphasized the need to integrate both a children’s rights and a child development perspective into programming. Child participation is often thought of as a right, but there are important child development aspects to this important concept which will be examined in this Topic.
Participation literally means to take part in something, to have a hand in it, join in, share, be a party to it, and so on. In the context of relief and development activities, child participation can be described as “listening to children, giving them space to articulate their own concerns, and taking into account the children’s maturity and capacities, enabling them to take part in the planning, conduct and evaluation of activities, within or outside the family sphere, which may imply involving them in decision making” 1 . This is reproduced on Overhead 7.2.
PARTICIPATION AS A CHILD RIGHTS
CONCEPT
The notion of participation is firmly embedded in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 12 states “State Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the view of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child”: this appears as Overhead 7.3.
In addition to this important provision, Article 13 refers to the child’s right to freedom of expression, Article 14 refers to the child’s right to freedom of association and of peaceful assembly. Article 17 stresses the importance of children’s access to information.
Roger Hart2 describes
participation as “the fundamental right of citizenship” and is of particular
importance in underlining the notion of children as subjects of rights and not
merely as objects of them. But participation does not just happen: it needs adults
to provide a facilitating environment to enable young people to participate in accordance
with their emerging competencies.
PARTICIPATION AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT
Participation is a vital aspect of child
development, and can be examined under three headings:
1. Children are active in their own
development.
In Topic 2 a “transactional” approach to child development was suggested, in which children - from a very young age - are responsive to and participate in shaping their environment. Children are both influenced in their development by their environment, and in turn they influence it. A healthy, active baby, for example, will influence parents’ behaviour and will cause them to give him/her more positive attention than would a passive or constantly irritable baby. As children grow up, there is a recognizable sequence of their evolving capacity to participate, though there will be both individual and cultural differences about the actual ages at which particular competencies are developed.
Competencies for participating in social interaction and decision-making will include the following:
• language ability – the ability to communicate and to use language to collaborate with others;
• empathy - the ability to understand the feelings and views of others;
• abstract thinking - for example the ability to conceptualize an unseen process towards a non-concrete goal;
• an understanding of time;
• the capacity for controlling one’s impulses - i.e. the immediate and self-centred satisfaction of needs and wishes;
• the ability to understand and accept that a participatory exercise may benefit other people rather than oneself;
• the ability to concentrate, listen, analyze, project one’s point of view etc.;
•
the
ability to control emotions, especially anger and frustration.
In general, children aged around 5, 6 and 7 are able to participate in and take decisions about activities which are very concrete and familiar and where the results show themselves immediately. From the age of around 8 and 9, children’s competence in participation develops rapidly and by the age of 10 - 12, many of the competencies listed above will be acquired at quite a mature level, though care needs to be taken that the issues involved are understood fully. Experience suggests that, in general, adolescents are able to be very active participants and can be engaged in programmed at a deep level. It must be remembered, however, that there will be significant cultural differences regarding the age at which particular competencies are acquired, as well as individual differences. There are also significant issues regarding both gender and the cultural value attached to the participation of children, which will be discussed below.
2. Enabling children to participate can enhance their development.
Participation involves listening to
children, in a non-patronizing way, taking their ideas and opinions seriously,
and (where appropriate) allowing them to take responsibility for making
decisions. This can be validating for children and can serve to enhance their
self-esteem and confidence, as well as enabling them to acquire skills such as
those outlined above. There is also some research evidence which suggests that
when children and adolescents have opportunities to participate meaningfully
and to contribute to the environment in which they are involved, resilience is
enhanced.
3. Child and adolescent participation can enable better decisions to be made.
At the most basic level, planning for individual children (for example, planning interim care, family tracing etc. for a separated child) will be much more effective if the child is enabled to reveal information about herself and her family, if she is informed about the progress of family tracing and if she is involved in discussions and decisions about her future (depending, of course, on age and ability to participate). At a broader level, programme planning and development will be enhanced by child participation: for example, a reproductive and sexual health programme will be most likely to meet the particular needs of young people if they are involved in a meaningful way in identifying the problems they experience, and in determining the focus of the programme and the way it is to be run: they are also more likely to use the programme if they feel some ownership of it. See ARC Resource Pack on Situation Analysis, Topic 8, for ideas on involving young people in situation analysis and programme planning. The Resource Pack on Sexual and Reproductive Health (Topics 2 and 3) examines the importance of participation in decision making.
PARTICIPATION: CULTURAL AND GENDER ISSUES
The idea of child participation may well challenge what is generally considered appropriate behaviour for children in many societies and child-rearing traditions, and may be difficult to introduce in contexts in which it is the norm for “children to be seen but not heard”. This has to be weighed against some of the real advantages which can result from child participation, while a sensitive approach needs to be taken in order that the key players - staff, parents, the children themselves etc. - can see the benefits and not perceive participation as a threat.
Participation implies responsibility and it may be helpful to emphasize this fact when working towards a more participatory way of working. It is worth noting that the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child includes a section on the Responsibilities of the Child (Article 31). It is through the collaborative work with others that children as well as adults learn to exercise responsibilities.
Real participation is unlikely to be achieved unless the staff involved in a programme are really committed to it. One study has suggested that staff working within a hierarchical, authoritarian organization that does not encourage staff participation are likely to find the idea of child participation difficult.
Gender issues can be highly significant:
in many contexts, there may be more organized opportunities for boys to
participate than girls, which may reflect both cultural attitudes towards
gender, and the fact that girls often have a greater burden of work placed upon
them in the home. It is not uncommon to find programmed designed mainly around
the needs of boys, especially in refugee camps where they may be more visible -
and perhaps perceived as being more potentially troublesome - than girls.
Particular care may need to be taken to ensure that girls become actively
engaged, and to ensure that participation in decision-making is not dominated
by boys.
PARTICIPATION - IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES
The principle of child participation is often now promoted by donors and by international agencies, but in practice fieldworkers frequently find the concept difficult to apply in a meaningful way, especially in cultures in which the idea is unfamiliar. Roger Hart has suggested that child participation can be depicted as a ladder, with various steps from activities which he describes as “non-participation” (manipulation, decoration and tokenism) through to various more positive degrees of involvement. These ideas are set out in Handout 7.1 and in Overhead 7.4. One of the limitations of Hart’s model is, firstly, that it is sometimes assumed that participation on the higher rungs of the ladder is always better than at the lower rungs of participation. The model should be seen as enabling adults to establish the conditions that enable children to participate at whatever level is appropriate to the particular circumstances.
A second limitation is that, in practice, participation cannot always be located along such a single continuum. Van Beers’ definition (see above) helps to highlight two distinct aspects of participation: at a basic level, it can involve children in articulating their ideas and concerns and taking part in something: at a more sophisticated level, it involves empowering them, enabling them to make decisions, take autonomous action, organize themselves etc. Programmed may seek to involve young people in the former way but not the latter, or vice versa. For example, in a non-formal education programme, the approach can be highly participatory, with children very actively involved in their own learning, but this basic level of participation could take place within a setting in which the centre’s objectives, the curriculum, teaching methods etc. have been developed by adults without any involvement of the children. In this sense, children are being actively involved in a participatory way in centre activities, but may not be empowered through involvement in the planning, conduct and evaluation of the programme. This may, of course, be entirely appropriate, depending on the circumstances.
Hart’s ladder is very useful in highlighting the danger of tokenism. Effective participation cannot be something “added on” to a programme, but needs to be embedded in the programme on the basis of very careful thought and planning. Efforts to help children "express their views" sometimes become rather prescribed, providing narrow and limited avenues for particular children or youth to speak to an audience of adults. Indeed, all too often such agendas have not emerged from children themselves, and it is not always clear that selected views in a formal context are representative of the broader population of children. A developmental perspective on participation emphasizes the fact that the nature and format of participation does not fit a pre-set template or fixed time frame. Rather, genuine participation must evolve according to basic principles of child development and within the given cultural, socio-economic and political context.
Appropriate and effective child and adolescent participation requires careful consideration of questions such as the following:
• What are the objectives of involving young people? Are they appropriate to the children’s emerging competencies and skills?
• In what areas and aspects of the programme are young people being involved? What are the appropriate limitations of child participation in this context?
• What are the local cultural attitudes towards child participation? How will participation be explained to the young people, parents, community leaders? What difficulties can be anticipated and how will they be overcome?
• What methods and techniques will be used to involve young people?
• Have gender issues been thought about and addressed? Will the participation of girls, or of boys, require particular approaches or techniques?
• Are the staff committed to child
participation? Have they experience the benefits of participation themselves?
Do they see it as any kind of threat to their own position, and if so how will
this be addressed?
This list is reproduced as Handout 7.2.
CHILD AND ADOLESCENT PARTICIPATION AND COMMUNITY MOBILISATION
The mobilization of young people to take collective action within their own communities is an approach which strongly emphasizes the participation of young people: this is examined in some detail in the ARC Resource Pack on Community Mobilization, Topic 7.