International journal on child maltreatment : research, policy and practice最新文献

The lengthy time of school closure was one defining factor in understanding child well-being during the pandemic in a context where school as a relational space holds great importance for children, particularly those from a low socioeconomic background. Considering this significant aspect of lengthy school closure during the pandemic in Turkey, this article explores children's experiences concerning their day-to-day access to education, digital inequalities, housing conditions, and changing context of relations with peers and teachers. The article also explores the meaning that children attribute to school as a relational space where they shape their intergenerational and generational relations. The absence of the school in children's lives for almost 2 years has been a major source of longing for such significant childhood space. Following our earlier work on the children's negotiation of well-being within the boundaries of the relational spaces of home and school, this article looks into how children negotiate their well-being in a pandemic environment where school as a relational space has changed its meaning and where children's caretakers' (teachers, parents, and other) vulnerabilities have also increased. The analysis draws on the qualitative fieldwork carried out with 50 children during the summer of 2020 in Turkey. We aim to reflect on the experiences from children's perspectives within the boundaries of the constraints that the pandemic has generated. This article also discusses how COVID-19 has widened the gap and increased vulnerabilities among the already disadvantaged groups and gender in terms of available resources and their allocation as it is reflected in time use that portrays the meaning that children attribute to their own experience during the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic represented not only a health crisis, but a social crisis for children, one that has disrupted notions of what a good childhood is. However, the longer-term implications of the pandemic are still to be seen, for children, their families and communities. This article is concerned with what these ongoing changes may be, based on a qualitative multi-stage study that asks children about their experiences of well-being before the pandemic, during lockdowns and post-COVID-19 lockdowns. This included asking seven children in online semi-structured interviews about what aspects of life brought on by COVID-19 restrictions they would like to see continue post-lockdown. We outline some of our findings. We describe new rituals and ways of organising time developed by children, facilitated by the use of digital technologies. We describe these new ways of managing time as task-based rather than rule-based, with children experiencing slowness of and greater control over their time. We found that lockdowns provided a possibility for children to assert a public agency through banal acts of sociability, for example, by conforming to public health measures such as mask-wearing and hand-washing. Whilst small acts, children discussed these in terms of being moral agents (protecting the safety of others) and as part of a larger civic attitude they observed around them. Thus, their acts can be seen as expressions of larger forms of social solidarity that contributed to a sense of collective effervescence.

This paper aims to contribute to the theory on school-related well-being by applying a qualitative approach that focuses on children's experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic and conceptualizes them as an epistemic opportunity to reconstruct aspects of school-related well-being from children's perspectives. Within the framework of the multinational qualitative study Children's Understandings of Well-being (CUWB), it conceptualizes well-being as a cultural construct and argues for including children's voices in the process of knowledge production. By drawing on statements from online interviews with 11- to 14-year-old children from Berlin, Germany in spring 2021 during school lockdown and by using a discourse analytical approach, the paper outlines the findings on visibility as a central feature of well-being in school environments that children make relevant for experiences of agency, security, and self. Visibility in school is constructed as a medium of control that subjects their bodies to norms of the school, exposes the individual to the gaze of others, and provides security in the context of the digital sphere and its temptations. The paper argues to systematically include these reflections and assessments of new digital learning arrangements during the Covid-19 pandemic into theoretical concepts on school-related well-being.