Right of Participation in Care and Protection Contexts

Abstract

This investigation aims to analyze the right to participate related specifically to the notions of care and protection. The research provided here is of a qualitative nature and it also encompasses an analysis of the significance and relevance institutionalized teenagers place on the process of protection during their daily lives. Professionals have a tendency of portraying sheltered teenagers in a negative light, accusing them of an apparent lack of skills and responsibilities. Said professionals will therefore deny them of their rights to participate and consider these teenagers unable to contribute socially and politically speaking in their surroundings, claiming said lack of skills, and supposed lack of rationality and maturity. Through a series of interviews, we inquire about the way kids in need interpret and foresee their life trajectories as sheltered individuals, as well as the opportunities they believe they’ll have to develop as legal subjects. Our experiences have shown that these teenagers will exhibit the use of several strategies to ascertain their autonomy, as well as being able to demand, from child welfare professionals and their families (as some may still have them) the opportunity to rightfully have a say on their lives. They show, as well, a tendency to search for places and opportunities to freely make their own decisions without professional or family supervision. Child protection services, usually regarding kids without a home or family, will sometimes become an institution that robs these kids and teenagers of their autonomy and act as a conflict mediator between professionals, the families of the kids (again, in the case of the few who still have them) and the sheltered kids themselves. Since this research tackles a topic with little precedence, it brings about a new way of seeing and understanding the notion of sheltering and protecting kids and teenagers.