Children on their Participation, Nature, Competence, Rights, and Difference from Adults in the 2018 Parkland School Shooting Protests

Abstract

Using a “child participation research as duty fulfilment and investigation” approach, we looked into US children’s participation reasons in the 2018 Parkland shooting protests. As duty bearers, we highlight children’s protest participation reasons ground up and in vivo. Then, we explore these reasons for children’s views on the four key issues hounding children’s rights. Using 326 randomly selected US middle and high school newsletters, we found ten significant themes substantively different from but logically linked with organisers’ publicised objectives. The reasons indicate children’s internalisation, a source of autonomy development, of the issues surrounding the shooting and protests. They reveal children’s views on the four key issues that emphasise the need to consider more the convergent and in-between of the mutually exclusive categories in childhood/child rights studies. Future studies should consider treating the being/becoming, nurturance/self-determination rights, and similar, convergent, and in-between categories in dynamic logical disjunctive relations. Our approach and similar child participation research approaches could also be further developed and used.

The non‐protesting children in the 2018 Parkland school shooting protests and their freedom not to express views in child participation spaces

“…In the summary presented in Table 2, we see that there are HS non‐protesters' reasons, especially concerning protest issues, that we expect MS students would eventually be concerned about. In Salva (2022), we also see that the significant HS protest participation reasons (e.g. ‘We have to be heard’, ‘We have seen so much loss and violence’, ‘We have power’, ‘We have to fight’ and ‘We have the right’) were reasons that a significant number of MS protesters have not yet claimed.…”

“…This is in stark contrast to how the students who participated in the Parkland protests justified their participation. In stating their protest participation reasons, featured in an earlier publication (Salva, 2022), the protesting students use first person plural (‘We have to act/do something,’ ‘We have to stop the fear and the worry,’ ‘We have to be heard,’ etc.). These are in vivo themes, not necessarily research artefacts.…”