Exploring Flemish Muslim children’s experiences and negotiation of offline and online group privacy

Abstract

In privacy research, much attention has been devoted to the online privacy practices of adolescents and college youth. Less is known about the privacy management of children and Muslim children in particular. In this study, we gave a voice to Muslim children in the northern Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, and how they negotiate information about their Muslim culture and identity using focus groups and interviews. The empirical studies clarify how different privacy management strategies are used to manage and hide Islam-related information. Overall, our results illustrate how besides managing boundaries around the self, Muslim children take into account the minority group they belong to as well as the representation of that particular group when sharing information. Building further on Petronio’s communication privacy management theory and Cohen’s perspective on privacy as critical and playful subjectivity, we argue to move beyond individual-centric conceptualizations to understand privacy of minority groups.