Search

Children's right to participate has been one of the most challenging rights to implement due to dominant norms which position children under adults' authority. Notably, this has more negatively impacted girls than boys due to traditional gender norms and practices that often restrict girls' agency and are reproduced and unchallenged in many societies. To contest these struggles, young female activists (13–17 years) in Sierra Leone, who are the focus of this paper, engaged in direct actions to influence public decision‐making and prevent girls from being married during childhood. Drawing upon empirical evidence exploring the girls' activism experiences, this article explore, young female activists' practical work is an example of what intersectionality as praxis means by connecting social categories to inequalities and highlights that they saw themselves as social actors with the ability to negotiate power, take part in community‐based activism to end child marriage and network with others to seek justice for practices and attitudes they perceived to be abusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children and young people are increasingly participating in events organised by international organisations. In spite of a growing body of research on children's participation in decision‐making, little is known about their experiences and the perceptions of adults who attend. This article compares the experiences of 16 children and 12 adults who participated in high‐level global events. Three themes were identified, Representation, Capacity and Impact. Findings suggest that while children and adults identified similar opportunities and challenges for meaningful participation, children's perceptions of their engagement differed from adults' in that they were more likely to be positive about the value of their contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on child activists' experiences in Bangladesh and Ghana, who mobilised to stop potential child marriages from their respective Child Forums and Children's Parliaments. Case studies were undertaken with 75 child activists, 10 girls whose child marriages had been stopped, and 22 adult stakeholders. The children's activism disrupted intergenerational relations – unsettling adults' attitudes towards children – and depended on such relations – children were successful in stopping child marriages because they drew on critical social capital and mobilised key stakeholders. Children's activism thus has lessons for children's participation literature more generally, in the synergies between children's mobilisation and intergenerational relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]