Child-led research, children’s rights and childhood studies – A reply to Thomas

We thank Patrick Thomas for his thoughtful response to our papers. There are places where we disagree with him, but the main purpose of our articles was to prompt discussion of the issues surrounding children’s rights and research ethics, the notion of childled research, and the nature of Childhood Studies (CS). Our, necessarily brief, response to his comments parallels the structure of his article. The aim of the first paper Thomas discusses, as indicated in its introduction, was to challenge the way in which appeals to children’s rights are made in much CS literature without sufficient attention to the problems that have long been identified with the notion of rights. In addition, questions were raised about the way in which the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is frequently appealed to, especially the assumption that compliance requires that research with children must take a ‘participatory’ form. Aside from the general problems with rights claims, it was pointed out that there is no explicit reference to the practice of research in the UNCRC; and that most of its articles are concerned with child protection rather than child participation. Thomas does not question the general discussion of the concept of rights – the fact that there are different types, sources, and groundings for them, and that they may be in conflict – but he does claim that Hammersley relies on a ‘misreading’ of the UNCRC. In support of this, he cites ‘The Committee on the Rights of the Child General Comment No. 12’. He is right that it was remiss for this not to have been taken into account, and he is also correct that this document suggests that Article 12 has wider application than Hammersley implies. However, while the document has sections dealing with a range of specific types of situation, there is none devoted to research, all that is said about it is that in paediatric research and clinical trials children’s consent must be gained, and that all research involving children should provide feedback to them. On our reading, despite its emphasis on children’s ‘participation’ generally, it does not warrant the claim that all research with children must take a participatory form in the manner that some have claimed. We focused on Article 12.1 of the UNCRC because it states the 1011835 CHD0010.1177/09075682211011835ChildhoodHammersley and Kim research-article2021