The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: A Transdisciplinary

Tool for Child Protection Research and Praxis

Contradictions of Child Protection October, 2015 - Helsinki

Associate Professor Richard C. MitchellBrock University, Canada

• To consider dimensions of transdisciplinarity

• To consider how transdisciplinarity might address child protection contradictions

• To consider the UNCRC as a transdisciplinary tool

Aims of Presentation

• Faculty in Child & Youth Studies Department

• 2001-04 PhD in Stirling University focusing on UNCRC

• 80s/90s counsellor in child & youth mental health, foster-care, child protection, educational, youth justice settings

• Always seeking common ground amongst, between child/family needs, service systems, larger society

Brief intro and a story from practice

• Scientific realist/post-positivist ontology using complex adaptive systems to understand child rights research, professional practice

• Critical theorist drawing from Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and socio-cultural, feminist thinkers

• Transdisciplinary lens to research UNCRC within law, education, health, social work, youth justice

Theoretical, methodological standpoint from practice

Is Child Rights glass ½ full or ½ empty?

Climate change; draining of aquifers; melting ice caps; Syrian war/asylum seekers; greed -> corruption -> capitalist collapse?

Contrasting greater health, longer life; global knowledge systems, Open Access; wind power, electric transportation, alternative energies all gaining momentum

• Swiss child developmentalist Jean Piaget, French sociologist Edgar Morin, Austrian astrophysicist Erich Jantsch began using simultaneously in 1970s

• Romanian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu founds UNESCO TD Institute in 1980s

• Observed TD “retains a certain charm mostly because it has not yet been corrupted by time” but perhaps this time has arrived (2002: p. 1)

Discursive development/etymology of Transdisciplinarity

Choi & Pak review of multi, inter, trans-disciplinarity (Clin Invest Med:

06/7/8)

• 3 terms used interchangeably often without comprehension

• Albrecht et al., (1998) argue TD reflects complexity underpins health, social sciences, allows emergence of interplay across disciplines/theories for multi-level explanations of problems

• Portuguese sociologist de Sousa Santos (2007) characterizes global North research machinery having excluded global South perspectives as “epistemicide”

Basarab Nicolescu (2002)observes

Multi-disciplinary goals still anchored in one disciplinary frameworkInter-disciplinary research concerns transfer of methods btwn disciplines, still anchored in one conceptual frameworkTransdisciplinary research has 3 degrees - concerned with levels of application, multiple epistemologies, potential for generating whole new disciplines – i.e. mathematical physics or computer art (perhaps childhood studies?)

Aussie health scientists Albrecht, Freeman & Higginbotham (1998: 57)

• Epistemologically TD addresses complexity of current problems thru diverse theories of knowledge from positivism to postmodernism

• Methodologically TD work inherently critical

aimed at problem-solving in non-academic settings

• Ontologically includes holistic, Indigenous frameworks, emergent properties of systems

1. Grounded in thinking about complex systems theory (CAS), broad ontological paradigms i.e. different levels of reality

2. Global reform movement in higher education originating w/European researchers in 1970s

3. TD critically oriented in attempting to re-integrate research within traditional scientific methods w/social sciences, arts, humanities & spiritual paradigms

6 Key dimensions of Transdisciplinarity

(Mitchell & Moore, 2015) …

4. Problem-focused on issues outside academia w/ non-academic partners particularly excluded populations

5. Participatory action methodologies

6. Post-colonial literature (NA; SA; NZ; Aus) includes Indigenous epistemologies while most European discourse does not

Key dimensions … (cont.)

• Expert 2009 study by Am. epidemiologist in childhood obesity from U of Minnesota argues…

…use of conceptual model to guide the research, a transdisciplinary approach, a longitudinal cohort design and state-of-the-art measures of individual and environment are strengths of this research (Lytle, p. 338).

• “Conceptual model” = Bronfenbrenner’s developmental social ecological model

• Good example of inter-disciplinary research striving towards TD while using positivist methods only and ignoring partnerships from outside the academy

To date, paucity of literature from within childhood studies - however

How might TD address contradictions in child protection

research?

• Pycroft (2014, p. 18) observes how social work, criminal justice, healthcare research use ‘scientific methods’ based upon Newtonian -Cartesian logic

• Results in linear, mechanistic approaches to understanding risk, research and practice with and for children

• Newtonian paradigm allows “absolutely no scope for notions of free will or human purposive action” (ibid., p. 20)

Looking at complexity theory/risk assessment in child protection they observe: similar to knowing how earthquakes and tsunamis occur we cannot predict when…

“…Trying to predict outcomes on basis of in-depth knowledge of factors making up any complex system is fallacious because ability to predict is based on linear thinking” (emphasis in original)

Stevens and Hassett (2007, p. 129)

• Complex adaptive systems informed by Edward Lorenz’ (1963) work as one of originators of chaos theory

• Concluded accurate analysis of any behavior requires “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” - a phenomenon he dubbed “The Butterfly Effect”

From linear risk models to complexity (Case & Haines,

2014, pp. 124-25)

• Over 50 years child protection research guided by linear, predictive models to understand child abuse and to inform practice

• Complex adaptive systems (like weather, families, societies) do not follow linear models – mathematically they follow power laws (Hassett & Stevens, 2014, p. 101)

Current Dominant Models for Child Protection Research

Minor injuries - bruises, cuts, minor burns 1000 treated in the house

Less minor injuries like bumps to the head 100deep cuts, persistent pain requiring medical intervention

Major injuries like broken bones, severe 10Burns requiring hospitalization

Fatalities 1

Power laws & child abuse (Stevens & Hassett, 2007, p. 132)

• Reflects complexity underpinning health, social sciences and allows an interplay across disciplines/theories to facilitate multi-level explanations of problems – including accounting for human agency and free-will of individuals

Recalling dimensions of transdisciplinarity from literature

Giroux and Searls-Giroux (2004, p. 102)

Researchers, academics, educators may be forced to work within academic disciplines, they can choose to develop transdisciplinary tools

Use these to contest economic, political, cultural conditions reproducing societal inequities and for praxis – ancient Greek word for applying theory to practice

Rights-based research with young people has shown evidence of a shift

• Moves away from tired debates over dichotomies of child protection vs participation

• Recent understanding of children’s political representation through the notion of children’s active citizenship (Mitchell, 2010, 2013, 2015)

Biggest challenge to interpreting legislation, in research, policy, practice is

Article 12

Right to meaningful Participation, to express views freely, offers opportunities to build relationship as ‘epistemological insiders’ (Mitchell & Moore, 2015b) sharing knowledge

Participation is interdependent on related UNCRC ‘Principles’

Article 2 Without discrimination

Article 3 Best Interests as primary consideration

Article 6 Survival and maximum development

POWER

ARTICLE

42

ARTICLE

44

Transdisciplinary Child Rights Model

(Mitchell, 2005, 2010)

• We’ve considered dimensions of transdisciplinarity such as complexity theory from vast literature

• We’ve considered how transdisciplinary thinking addresses child protection research contradictions

• We reviewed the UNCRC as a transdisciplinary tool to aid in transforming child protection research agendas

In review…