ABSTRACT Legal definitions of sexual consent emphasise ‘freedom’ as central to valid consent; however, power inequalities may complicate freedom. This paper discusses findings from a two-stage focus group study with young people (aged 13–23) in England exploring the implications of power inequalities for sexual consent. In Stage 1, 77 participants explored and ranked the types of power inequalities they felt were common within young people's sexual relationships, with age, gender and popularity being identified as the most common power inequalities. In Stage 2, 43 participants discussed power inequalities using scenarios based on the Stage 1 findings and considered their implications for sexual consent. Thematic analysis of the data produced two themes: powerless and powerful roles in consent communication and power inequalities implicitly constrain freedom to consent. Consent communication was constructed as a unidirectional process whereby those with more power initiate, and those with less, gatekeep. Such roles require deconstruction to position consent as mutual and actively negotiated by partners. Further, since power inequalities were seen to place implicit constraints on freedom to consent, we advocate for an explicit exploration of power and privilege within Relationships and Sex Education to equip young people to recognise, challenge and negotiate these constraints.

ABSTRACT In this article we aim to understand how everyday family practices and practices of intimacy are connected in the formation of emotional ties in young people’s family relationships, by examining their relationship with their parents across three generations. The analyses draw on qualitative biographical interviews conducted with women and men in intergenerational chains of 24 sons/daughters (born 1992–1993), 23 of their fathers/mothers (born 1963–1970) and 21 of their grandfathers/grandmothers (born 1931–1945). By first exploring the narratives of the joint everyday practices between young people and their parents and, second, examining the emotional reflexivity in these relational narratives, we highlight differences in young people’s relations to their parents. Contrasting the oldest (1950s) and youngest (2010s) youth generations reveals joint activities and closeness to parents in both generations, while the degree of disclosing intimacy, individualised respect and shared interests marks the co-constructive nature of the youngest’ parental relations. The middle generation’s narratives are distinctive in describing themselves and their parents as living separate lives. This article contributes to the growing field of sociological youth research on family relations and the intimate aspects of the relationships between youth and their parents.

ABSTRACT Political socialization of youth is crucial both in the maintenance of an illiberal regime and in the resistance by civil society. The present qualitative study provides insight into the personal motivations of student leaders of a youth resistance movement organized for the protection of academic autonomy against the ‘illiberal democracy’ of Hungary. The study sought to explore how collective historical memory contributes to political socialization, whether historical reflection was a source of inspiration and whether history education triggered conscious citizenship resulting in the engagement of youth in resistance. Data collection involved interviewing 15 former students of the University of Theatre and Film (Színház- és Filmművészeti Egyetem, SZFE) who played a key role in managing a 71 days long university blockade in 2020. Thematic analysis suggests that history education has the potential to trigger consciousness regarding citizens’ responsibility to confront power restricting individual freedoms and institutional autonomy. However, mainstream, alienating history education supported by the government in Hungary did not realize these potentials. Findings can be utilized in further research on the necessity of interactive, engaging history education methodologies to facilitate comparative reflection on history and current public affairs and to encourage conscious and active citizenship in illiberal regimes.

ABSTRACT Homelessness among young lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, gender-diverse and queer-identifying (LGBTQ+) persons is highly prevalent and constitutes a structural risk to health and future life chances. However, the distribution of homelessness burden is among different LGBTQ+ subgroups is poorly understood. An Australia-wide cross-sectional online survey was conducted involving 6,481 LGBTQ+ participants aged 14–21 years during 2019. Single-predictor logistic regression analyses identified factors associated with both lifetime and recent experiences of homelessness. Analyses also explored associations between recent (<12 months) experiences of homelessness, experiences of harassment, alcohol consumption, and psychological distress. Higher odds of experiencing homelessness were observed for trans and gender-diverse young people, individuals who identified with sexual identity labels other than lesbian, gay or bisexual, racially-minoritized persons, disabled persons and individuals from a religious family or household, compared to their respective counterparts. Experiencing homelessness was associated with higher levels of alcohol consumption and higher prevalence of experiencing verbal, physical and sexual harassment, but only modestly associated with higher levels of psychological distress. Homelessness risk and burden is unevenly distributed among LGBTQ+ youth and is linked to outcomes which may potentiate future homelessness. Interventions addressing homelessness among this group must be optimized for those subgroups most vulnerable to experiencing homelessness.

ABSTRACT Children in out-of-home care have a developmental need for safe and secure relationships to meet their long-term social, emotional and physical needs. Permanency has been a guiding principle in child protection since the mid-1970s, with the focus on creating legal and residential certainty. Permanency is a complex felt and lived experience for children and young people that cannot be reduced to a single dimension, such as legal permanency. A critical gap exists in understanding the perspective of young people and using research methods such as Photovoice that facilitate expression of intangible concepts. Eleven care-experienced young people aged 16 to 25 years took part in participatory research in New South Wales. Participants used photography to explore literal and metaphorical experiences of permanency and thematic analysis was used to interpret visual and textual data. The results present a more nuanced picture of permanency as an internal state and reveal that young people actively cultivate the felt sense of security and belonging in their lives through connection with nature, people and culture. Photovoice empowers participants as co-creators of knowledge and presents new insights to inform public discourse and policy and practice developments.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates young people’s mobile practices of ‘making do’ as they negotiate work, study and play in the home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on Singapore, and drawing on original empirical data derived from online journaling by twenty participants, the paper elaborates on their practices of ‘making do’ when working from home. Using an interdisciplinary approach spanning youth, cultural and architectural studies, the paper considers new formations and appropriations of domestic time and space. Critically situating the home as a hybrid domestic characterised by its porous public-private space and multiple-disjunctive time, ‘making do’ is evident in a range of spatial tactics: from occupying temporary mobile spaces to altering physical spaces with objects and devices, to time-sharing, to developing practices that affirm and contest ascribed social roles. Through switching objects and roles in the hybrid domestic home, our study participants not only created new mobilities within the immobile constraints of the pandemic home, they also transformed the spatial and temporal norms of study, work and play.

ABSTRACT Globally, there has been attention to the role of youth activism in bringing about socially just change and the associated learning that occurs through this action. Young people in Malaysia have been found to be less likely to be politically active than their elders, but few research studies have focused on activism amongst Indigenous youth. This exploratory interview study focuses on motivations and challenges experienced by eight highly educated Malaysian Indigenous youth (aged 19–24). Youth took action for Indigenous rights in politics, education, development and health. We find systemic oppression and lack of control over their environment as key motivators for activism. These were associated with lack of representation in education and politics, and existential threats posed by major development projects involving dams, oil palm plantations and rice cultivation. Challenges faced by Indigenous youth in their activism included backlash from peers, tensions associated with maintaining true representation, fear of consequences of resistance, and the language of politics and legal knowledge. Education and social networking has an important – and currently under-utilised – role to play in enabling young people to live with dignity.

ABSTRACT This article addresses young people’s school-to-work transitions. The analysis draws on data from a Swedish ongoing qualitative longitudinal project spanning over 10 years. In this article, we focus on eight young people who grew up and still live in a small rural inland town in North Sweden where the regional labor market is going through a process of rapid reindustrialization after decades of industrial decline and welfare state retrenchment. The aim of the study is to explore the young rural ‘stayers’ transitions in a region characterized by strong economic growth, yet with long-standing challenges in terms of social reproduction, focusing on what kind of work they end up with and their speed of establishment on the labor market. At the time of the latest interview all but one of the 8 participants in this study had employment in local or regional industries, however, how fast they had managed to establish themselves on the labor market varied between them. Further, their staying on locally depended largely on regional mobility. We discuss their transitions in relation to the ongoing re-industrialization process in North Sweden but also what implications young stayers’ school-to-work transitions might have in relation to the wider social reproduction in the region.

ABSTRACT The proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds in England reporting a longstanding mental health condition increased almost 10-fold between 1995 and 2014. Studies demonstrate an association between income and anxiety and depression, with bi-directional effects. There is also emerging evidence that cash transfers may mitigate, prevent or delay those conditions. This article presents qualitative data exploring the relationship between income and anxiety and depression and the prospective impact of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a public health measure. Data was gathered from citizen engagement workshops with 28 young people aged 14–22 from Bradford, England. We present four findings: (i) participants believe that the current work and welfare system has a detrimental impact on their mental health; (ii) most participants believe that UBI would have positive impacts on their mental health by virtue of reducing financial strain; (iii) most participants appear to favour a UBI scheme with larger payments than have traditionally been proposed; (iv) participants believe that there are non-financial benefits of UBI, such as reduction in stigma.

ABSTRACT In accounts of local Islamist jihad, little attention has been directed to how young women exercise agency when they face arranged marriages with jihadi fighters. They undergo a different kind of life transition, one that has rarely been examined in youth studies. This paper reports on a study of how young female Muslims in arranged marriages with mujahidin men navigated their transitions to adulthood in Eastern Indonesia. The study employed an ethnographic approach, including live-in observation and interviews. The data was analysed using a biographical narrative approach. We found that some young local women were married off to previously unknown mujahidin men. As the Muslim–Christian conflict raged around them, they navigated their roles of wife and mother while embedded in a jihadi network justified by Islamist ideology. Later, following the arrest of their husbands, they gained some agency and asserted a more independent adulthood by actively shaping their own life trajectories. The analysis extends our broader knowledge of (female) youth transitions in civil conflict situations in the Global South.