This article provides a reflection on the ethical challenges faced when seeking ethical approval to include young people in a research project examining LGBT+ ‘hate’ experiences. I outline the ethical parameters constructed when attempting to recruit under 18’s into the project and justify the rationale for doing so. I detail how ethical approval was gained and reflect on the safeguards put in place to protect young participants. The methodological position adopted took a youth affirmative outlook, premised on enabling and championing the autonomy and agency of young people. Traditional ethical guidelines maintain that parental consent is required to include young people within sensitive research. Seeking parental consent placed young participants in a position of greater risk than what would occur during participation. Parental consent was not sought for young people to participate, nor were they informed about the involvement of their children in the project. This article provides justifications on rejecting the notion that parental consent is the only means for youth inclusion, and details how young people were empowered during participation. I argue that young people should not be instinctively excluded from sensitive research but should be actively enabled by minimising but not eradicating possible and potential risk.
HCI is increasingly working with 'vulnerable' people, yet there is a danger that the label of vulnerability can alienate and stigmatize the people such work aims to support. We report our study investigating the application of interaction design to increase rates of hate crime reporting amongst Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender young people. During design-led workshops, participants expressed ambivalence towards reporting. While recognizing their exposure to hate crime, they simultaneously rejected being identified as victim as implied in the act of reporting. We used visual communication design to depict the young people's ambivalent identities and contribute insights into how these fail and succeed to account for the intersectional, fluid and emergent nature of LGBT identities through the design research process. We argue that by producing ambiguously designed texts alongside conventional outcomes, we 'trouble' our design research narratives as a tactic to disrupt static and reductive understandings of vulnerability within HCI.
This paper reports on an exploratory study, which gathered LGBT+ young people's (aged 15-22) experiences and perceptions of hate crime. Two design-led workshops were conducted in the North East of England, with the aim of identifying the reporting needs of LGBT+ young people. Participants in the first workshop were asked what types of 'hate' scenarios they would report to the police. Participants in the second workshop were asked to design hate crime reporting devices. Young people were ambivalent about reporting their experiences to the police as their victimization was intimately tied to people they were connected with (parents, school peers, acquaintances). They highlighted a variety of response needs when reporting victimization. This article argues that acts of bullying and acts of anti-LGBT+ hate crime are symmetrical in their tangibility. LGBT+ youth victimization is currently framed, within scholarly discourse, as a bullying issue involving peer victimization. However, the criminological discourse on LGBT+ adult victimization is framed as hate crime. The data provided bridges this gap by conceptualizing youth victimization as a form of hate crime, an important contribution in recognizing the report needs of young LGBT+ people.
PICKLES, James (2019). Policing hate and bridging communities: a qualitative evaluation of relations between LGBT+ people and the police within the North East of England. Policing and society.
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