This work features writings by death-row inmates, family members of victims and perpetrators, religious and political figures, journalists, criminologists, and legal experts, along with information on programs designed to help young people who have gone astray. Intimate personal accounts reveal the fear and regret of death-row inmates as well as the horror and anxiety of their loved ones. In one moving chapter, a mother speaks candidly about the murder of her daughter and how she feels toward the murderer. Alternately grief-stricken and angry, she concludes that it is up to every citizen to play a part in helping our troubled children before they grow up to become gun-toting hoodlums. The book advocates rehabilitation programs, a new national emphasis on broken families and the problems of youth, child care for single mothers, and an overhaul of the juvenile-justice system. Dicks calls for a distinction between justice and revenge, and offers a provocative, wrenching, yet realistic look at a problem that threatens the future of our society.

This book offers an empirically informed understanding of how cultural, autobiographical and absent memories of orphanhood interact and interconnect or come into being in the re-telling of a life story and construction of an identity. The volume investigates how care experienced identities are embedded within personal, social and cultural practices of remembering. The book stems from research carried out into the life (hi)stories of twelve undervalued 'historical witnesses' (Roberts, 2002) of orphanhood: women who grew up in Nazareth House children's home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Several themes are covered, including histories of care in Northern Ireland, narratives and memories, sociologies of home, and self and identity. The result is an impressive text that works to introduce readers to the complexity of memory for care experienced people and what this means for their life story and identity.

This book analyzes the memoirs of 42 'missionary kids' - the children of North American Protestant missionaries in countries all over the world during the 20th century. Using a postcolonial lens the book explores ways in which the missionary enterprise was part of, or intersected with, the Western colonial enterprise, and ways in which a colonial mindset is unconsciously manifested in these memoirs. The book explores how the memoirists' sites and experiences are exoticized; the missionary kids' likelihood of learning - or not learning - local languages; the missionary families' treatment of servants and other local people; and gender, race and social class aspects of the missionary kids' experiences. Like other Third Culture Kids, the memoirists are migrants, travelers, border-crossers and border-dwellers who alternate between insider and outsider statuses, and their words shed light on the effects of movement and travel on children's lives and development.

The problem of children 'in trouble' is the subject of repeated media panics and of heated political rhetoric. Drawing on wide-ranging original research, Carol Hayden reviews evidence about children in trouble across a range of circumstances, demonstrating the tensions between welfare and justice, care and control in the treatment of these vulnerable young people and evaluating the methodological as well as practical implications of the current 'what works' debate within social policy. All students and professionals working with children, whether in social work, teaching or the criminal justice system, will find this book invaluable.

This timely volume offers an in-depth theoretical analysis of children's experiences growing up with mobile internet technologies. Drawing on up-to-date research, it explores the relationship between childhood as a social and cultural construction and the plethora of mobile internet technologies which have become ubiquitous in everyday life.

In a constantly changing world, individuals are forever growing to meet the challenges and developments that emerge around them. In contemporary society, technology is at the heart of change. Literature, too, reflects the evolution of culture and increasingly represents and considers technology. And as children become young adults, their reading helps shape their understanding of the world. This book examines representative works of science fiction, children's literature, and popular culture to show how these works reflect the process of growing up in a technological world. The volume looks at the simple picture books and comic books that appeal to small children; the formulaic adventures that fascinate older children; the films and television programs that are watched by children and young adolescents; the music videos and programming that appeal to young adults; and the popular novels that interest older readers. Included are discussions of Superman, the Hardy Boys, Star Trek, science fiction films, and music videos. The book points to similarities among popular culture, science fiction, and children's literature and demonstrates the relevance of these works to contemporary society.

This International Volume of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth shows the breadth of current empirical research that focuses on children and youth around the world. Coming from a range of methodological and theoretical orientations, this volume showcases the lives of children and the policies that shape children's lives on five continents. Across these research articles, it becomes clear that we cannot continue to assume a certain meaning of childhood, because this concept is bound by both cultural and structural factors. Cultural expectations influence how societies view children and how children view themselves. A handful of these studies show how immigrant children and youth provide particularly interesting insight as they navigate more than one cultural context. Structural factors also become salient, as children come from unequal backgrounds, different levels of economic development, and face varying political concerns. While these papers come from different doorsteps of the world, cultural and structural threads of continuity connect them as meaningful for children. This volume illustrates how international childhood researchers can use current concepts and theories into unlikely contexts exposing their limitations and helping to inform more versatile and robust lines of thinking for children and youth studies.

The presence of Asian immigrants and citizens has a long history in the United States. Asian American Children: A Historical Handbook and Guide provides insights into the diverse experience of these children and their families from their first appearance here to the present. Essays review topics such as identity, family structures, labor, gender, and class. Selected primary documents review topics such as racial quotas, biculturalism, and refugees. This is the first work to cover the historical and the contemporary experience of these children from a multiplicity of views, using essays and documents. Beginning c. 1850, this work relates the experiences and context in which diverse groups of Asian American children lived their lives. The voices of children, included in the primary documents, provide a vivid narrative of immigrant life over the past 150 years. While the lives of children were generally included in historical narratives of the country, a focus specifically on children allows the reader to more fullyunderstand the central place of family in the economic and social development of a nation.

This text provides a critical analysis of the social construction of childhood and children's agency. Through an interdisciplinary synthesis combining social theory, social policy and the empirical findings of social science research, it bridges the current gap between theory and practice, offering an incisive theoretical account of childhood that is grounded in substantive areas of children's lives such as health, education, crime and the family. This furthers understanding of the impact of policy on children's everyday lives and social experiences.

Educating young people about sex and sexuality remains one of the most controversial and political areas of the school curriculum. Drawing on young people's own understandings of their sexual selves, knowledge and practices "Sexual Subjects" considers the implications for how we conceptualize the effectiveness of sexuality education. Reshaping thinking around youthful (hetero)sexualities "Sexual Subjects" challenges current approaches to teaching about sex and sexuality.

There is a growing interest in philosophy with children, based on the belief that classroom philosophising not only enhances children's oral language, literacy and thinking but also promotes independence of mind and spirit, benefiting the children, their teachers and the school as a whole.
Children as Philosophers is an accessible and thought-provoking book that balances an exploration of theoretical and critical considerations of using philosophy in the classroom with real examples of children working as philosophers.
Based on research by the author with primary school students, and full of practical suggestions for teachers, it demonstrates that, from a young age, children are capable of engaging in a sophisticated process of dialogue and enquiry and argues that they should have space and time to do so. The book offers a structure for moral enquiry within the PSHE and Citizenship curriculum. It discusses the pleasures and challenges for adults in managing discussion and facing children's claims to knowledge in the philosophical arena. The book addresses the well-established Philosophy for Children movement, developed in the USA and Australia, and puts this into a UK context.

This book explores the role of children and young people within early modern England's Catholic minority. It examines Catholic attempts to capture the next generation, Protestant reactions to these initiatives, and the social, legal and political contexts in which young people formed, maintained and attempted to explain their religious identity.

This collection explores mobile childhoods: from Latvia and Estonia to Finland; from Latvia to the United Kingdom; from Russia to Finland; and cyclical mobility by the Roma between Romania and Finland. The chapters examine how east-to-north European family mobility brings out different kinds of multilocal childhoods. The children experience unequal starting points and further twists throughout their childhood and within their family lives. Through the innovative use of ethnographic and participatory methods, the contributors demonstrate how diverse migrant children's everyday lives are, and how children themselves as well as their translocal families actively pursue better lives. The topics include naming and food practices, travel, schooling, summer holidays, economic and other inequalities, and the importance of age in understanding children's lives. Translocal Childhoods and Family Mobility in East and North Europe will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology and human geography.

The testimonies of individuals who survived the Holocaust as children pose distinct emotional and intellectual challenges for researchers: as now-adult interviewees recall profound childhood experiences of suffering and persecution, they also invoke their own historical awareness and memories of their postwar lives, requiring readers to follow simultaneous, disparate narratives. This interdisciplinary volume brings together historians, psychologists, and other scholars to explore child survivors' accounts. With a central focus on the Kestenberg Holocaust Child Survivor Archive's over 1,500 testimonies, it not only enlarges our understanding of the Holocaust empirically but illuminates the methodological, theoretical, and institutional dimensions of this unique form of historical record.

This book discusses already established accounts about the sexualization of children through a theoretical and an empirical framework which bring together popular culture, consumption, sexuality, selfhood and childhood. Adopting the view that the debate about the sexualization of childhood is socially constructed, it pushes beyond the dominant preconceptions about 'the risks of childhood'. Moral judgements about children's welfare are perhaps nowhere more transient and controversial than when it comes to children's sexuality, something that has deep historical roots. However, and contrary to recurrent fears and moral panics about the loss of childhood as a result of a tidal wave of a sexualizing culture, this book theorizes the notion of children's sexualization within the social construction of myths of childhood innocence while also taking into account the extent of young people's actual engagement with media and technology in contemporary Western societies. It is within such a contextual framework that this book unfolds, bringing together a historical contextualization of childhood, sexuality and pornography with contemporary empirical accounts regarding the 'presentation of the self' and self-management.

Children and Social Change explores memories of childhood. Dorothy Moss examines experiences not commonly associated with everyday childhood, focusing on, for example war, migration, employment, religion, policing, and civil and industrial unrest. Her research explores how children engage with wider social change through their relationships with their families, communities and nations. It focuses on how they carve out space and time for themselves from complex social relations. The research is informed by academic ideas about social memory, space and time, and discusses the selectivity of memories of childhood and how these are filtered through later social experience, family stories and research processes.

This book follows the transnational lives of children growing up as British Bangladeshi individuals in multicultural London. Exploring the array of international events, communities and forces which influence them, Zeitlyn examines the socialisation practices among British Bangladeshi families and how this shapes their childhood and identities.

"Childhood in Question" explores the historical development, from the 1600s to the 1960s, of childhood experience. Drawing on artifacts as diverse as state papers, legal records, diaries, letters and oral sources, the authors probe a series of key issues: the definition of "the child" and the formation of identity; the emotional world of childhood; the changing attitudes of the state to family intimacy and parent-child relations; the sexuality of children; children and authority; and children and crime.

Today, any regular newspaper reader is likely to be exposed to reports on manifold forms of (physical, emotional, sexual) child abuse on the one hand, and abnormal behavior, misconduct or offences of children and minors on the other hand. Occasionally reports on children as victims and children as offenders may appear on the same issue or even the same page. Rather seldom the more complex and largely hidden phenomena of structural hostility or indifference of society with a view to children are being dealt with in the press. Such fragmentary, ambiguous, incoherent or even contradictory perception of children in modem society indicates that, firstly, there is a lack of reliable information on modem childhood, and secondly, children are still treated as a comparatively irrelevant population group in society. This conclusion may be surprising in particular when drawn at the end of The Century of the Child proclaimed by Ellen Key as early as 1902. Actually, there exist unclarities and ambiguities about the evolution of childhood in the last century not only in public opinion, but also in scientific literature. While De Mause with his psycho-historic model of the evolution of childhood, comprising different stages from infanticide, abandonment, ambivalence, intrusion, socialisation to support, underlines the continuous improvement of the condition of childhood throughout history and thus rather confirms Key's expectations, Aries, with his social history of childhood, seems to hold a more culturally pessimistic view.

Children are recruited to fight in conflicts around the world and violent cruelty characterizes many of the conflicts in which children participate. Some children are perpetrators of some of the worst acts of depraved murder, disfigurement, and terrorism imaginable. They then struggle to reintegrate into communities that were victims of the violence. Taking into account the interests of children and other victims of conflict, and considering the needs of post-conflict communities, this book examines and offers suggestions for how transitional justice practices should conceptualize and address the involvement of child soldiers in violent collective harm.
This book will appeal to a wide range of scholars from International Relations, Criminal Justice, Law, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Development and African Studies.

This book is an ethnography of teachers and children in grades 1 and 2, and presents arguments about why we should take gender and childhood sexuality seriously in the early years of South African primary schooling. Taking issue with dominant discourses which assumes children's lack of agency, the book questions the epistemological foundations of childhood discourses that produce innocence. It examines the paradox between teachers' dominant narratives of childhood innocence and children's own conceptualisation of gender and sexuality inside the classroom, with peers, in heterosexual games, in the playground and through boyfriend-girlfriend relationships. It examines the nuances and finely situated experiences which draw attention to hegemonic masculinity and femininity where boys and girls challenge and contest relations of power. The book focuses on the early makings of gender and sexual harassment and shows how violent gender relations are manifest even amongst very young boys and girls. Attention is given to the interconnections with race, class, structural inequalities, as well as the actions of boys and girls as navigate gender and sexuality at school. The book argues that the early years of primary schooling are a key site for the production and reproduction of gender and sexuality. Gender reform strategies are vital in this sector of schooling.

That children need nature for health and well-being is widely accepted, but what type of nature? Specifically, what type of nature is not only necessary but realistically available in the complex and rapidly changing worlds that children currently live in? This book examines child-nature definitions through two related concepts: the need for connecting to nature and the processes by which opportunities for such contact can be enhanced. It analyses the available nature from a scientific perspective of habitats, species and environments, together with the role of planning, to identify how children in cities can and do connect with nature. This book challenges the notion of a universal child and childhood by recognizing children's diverse life worlds and experiences which guide them into different and complex ways of interacting with the natural world. Unfortunately not all children have the freedom to access the nature that is present in the cities where they live. This book addresses the challenge of designing biodiverse cities in which nature is readily accessible to children.

This book presents the results of researches conducted with children and youth at risk for over 20 years in Brazil. It addresses a series of topics related to children and youth living in poverty or in situations of social vulnerability, such as family, sexual and dating violence; adolescent mothers and mothers who put their children for adoption; children and youth living in foster and institutional care; and adolescents involved in drug trafficking or incarcerated in juvenile detention centers. Building upon the Bioecological Theory of Human Development, this volume emphasizes the innovative knowledge about psychosocial development of vulnerable children and youth produced in Brazil and aims to present theoretical and methodological approaches developed especially for the countries of the Global South, in an attempt to overcome the scientific divide between the North and South. Northern research agenda defines as global the theories, methodologies, and application of knowledge on social policies and interventions. However, the contexts, histories, and cultural processes are essential for producing and applying research knowledge according to specific regional characteristics, organizations, and conditions. Human development is related to contextual features and cannot be directly imported from one place to another. Departing from these original theoretical and methodological approaches, the book also presents the results of evidence-based interventions, showing its effectiveness in specific contexts. All of this makes Vulnerable Children and Youth in Brazil - Innovative Approaches from the Psychology of Social Development a valuable tool for psychologists, educators, social scientists and public health professionals studying or working with children and youth at risk in different parts of the world, contributing to the understanding of human development in cultural context.

The Age of Consent; Young People, Sexuality and Citizenship addresses the contentious issue of how children's sexual behaviour should be regulated. The text includes: *A unique history of age of consent laws in the UK, analysed via contemporary social theory *A global comparative survey of age of consent laws and relevant international human rights law *A critical analysis of how protectionist agendas shaped new age of consent laws in England and Wales in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 *In-depth theoretical discussion of the rationale for age of consent laws *An original proposal to reduce the age of consent to 14 for young people who are less than two years apart in age Responding to contemporary concerns about young people's sexual behaviour, sexual abuse and paedophilia, this book will engage readers in law and socio-legal studies, sociology, history, politics, social policy, youth and childhood studies, and gender and sexuality studies; and professionals and practitioners working with young people.