‘If you wanna have an easy life in secure, you have to bite your tongue’: Children’s narratives of power, voice and resistance in the children & young people secure estate

Abstract

Locking up and detaining children and young people is and should be a human rights issue per se (Aymer et al., 1991). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child provides that ‘no child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully…the restriction of liberty shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time’ (United Nations General Assembly, 1989). It follows on to state that legal safeguards should be put in place to protect children’s human rights in settings where their rights and liberties are restricted. Despite this there is overwhelming evidence that in the Children and Young People Secure Estate (CYPSE) in the United Kingdom, children’s rights are inconsistently and excessively restricted, suggesting insufficient protection of their human rights (Goldson, 2006). Although the CYPSE is a highly restrictive setting in which children and young people are deprived of their rights and liberties for welfare or criminal justice reasons, there has been very little focus on power, voice, participation and human rights within these settings. In this article the authors outline the narratives of nine children and young people detained in the CYPSE through semi structured narrative interviews. Analysis of the interviews produced themes around experiences of powerlessness, control and restriction, voice & participation and resistance. This paper presents a detailed focus on the narratives around voice and resistance. The authors offer critical insights into how the lived experiences of children and young people in these settings strengthens the need for practice and policy to be informed by children’s rights, power and participation. Implications for how clinical psychology is enacted in these settings is also explored and interrogated, with a deconstruction of the role of a Clinical Psychologist.