Listening to Children: A Childist Analysis of Children’s Participation in Family Law Cases

Abstract

Building on critical childhood studies and childism, this paper analyses children’s participation in family law cases in Denmark. Spurred particularly by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, together with a general shift in the view on children, several jurisdictions, including Denmark, have implemented legislative reform in the last decades to accommodate children’s participation rights. Even though such legal participation rights have increased, research in the family law field indicates that children’s perspectives are often undermined or excluded. An analysis of qualitative data (workshops, observations, and interviews) establishes how the positioning of children and children’s perspectives (as well as how “listening to children” is enacted) can be crucial to understanding the mechanisms that either subsidize or undermine children’s perspectives in family law cases. The paper argues further that “listening emergent” to children can offer a path to deconstructing the norms and structures that undermine and exclude children’s views—and thus offer a childist contribution to childhood research.