Children's voices against violence

Objectives Significant research exists on violation of children’s right to protection. However, there is inadequate representations of children’s voices on their nuanced experiences of sociospatial vulnerabilities,... [ view full abstract ]

Objectives

Significant research exists on violation of children’s right to protection. However, there is inadequate representations of children’s voices on their nuanced experiences of sociospatial vulnerabilities, particularly in the context of Global South. This paper aims to bring out children’s narratives to explore how children experience sociospatial vulnerabilities in their everyday lives and how this shape their wellbeing in the context of an urban slum community in Bangladesh.

Methods

Drawing on data from an eight-month long ethnographic study of an ongoing PhD project, in an Urdu-speaking Bihari community in Bangladesh, this paper explores how children experience violence as part of their everyday culture and exercise their agencies in negotiating violence towards their wellbeing. Interpreting data from the perspectives of new sociology of childhood, combined with the evidence of empirical studies in children's geographies, this paper presents narrations of children and adults, from data collected through individual interviews, group discussions, and participant observations.

Results

This paper presents two issues. First, children’s understandings and experiences of violence are not static, rather negotiated and contested through children’s everyday experiences, along with their age, birth order, gender and generational relationships. Second, children construct and negotiate their agencies to respond to the culture of violence that they experience in relation to their ethnic-linguistic identities in that particular sociospatial context.

Conclusions

This paper highlights the importance of having a contextual understanding of violence in a sociospatial context, in favour of making flexible and situated understandings about how children explore and promote their own wellbeing.