Judith Ennew and the Knowing Children Project

Abstract

Judith Ennew made vital contributions to changing the way children and childhood are viewed, researched and considered in policy and programming, as well as in anthropology and children’s geographies. In 2006 Judith founded the non-governmental child rights organisation Knowing Children (KC) in Bangkok, Thailand, a not-for-profit organisation, with the aim of improving the information available worldwide for designing policies and programmes for children. A crucial principle was that any such policy or programme must take into account children’s own opinions and experiences, and this necessitates doing research directly with them. KC brought together researchers from around the world to further refine and document the ethical, participatory and systematic methods Judith had developed over several decades for doing research with children, which she termed The Right to be Properly Researched. This resulted in an accessibly written ten-volume research manual of the same title (Ennew J, This is who I am’: rights-based project to establish identity for stateless children. Report on Phase I and Phase II; Planning for Phase III. Unpublished paper, 14 pp, 2009a; Ennew J, The right to be properly researched: How to do rights-based scientific research with children. Principal author: 10-manual boxed set. Knowing Children, Norwegian Centre for Child Research and World Vision International, Bangkok, 2009b). There are two important characteristics of these methods: firstly, the principle that children are subjects of human rights, whose lives are complex and multifaceted, and that any work with children should begin from a rights-based perspective and, secondly, their successful integration of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, which Judith refused to see as separate or opposed categories. As well as training local researchers, included the publishing arm, Black on White Publications, aimed to make books on research and policy issues to do with children and children’s rights more easily available to those who need them. KC carried out many research projects in Thailand and later in Malaysia, after Judith moved the organisation to Kuala Lumpur in 2010. These are detailed in this chapter. The problems faced by stateless children became a leading concern to Judith, and she joined forces with international NGOs campaigning for universal retrospective birth registration. In Kuala Lumpur, with the support of UNICEF, Judith established the Mousedeer Group, an inspirational online community for children in Malaysia, designed by the children themselves to disseminate knowledge about children’s rights. Most recently, she had plans to work with children with disabilities, a group she regarded as ‘the last frontier’ in terms of their relative neglect by researchers and the need to include them in considerations of children’s rights.