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 Unpublished paper, 14 pp, 2009a; Ennew J, The right to be properly researched: How to do rights-based scientific research with children.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.
This chapter places on record Judith’s vision for Knowing Children and the creativity and originality of thought which she applied to developing possible solutions to some of the most serious issues affecting children today. It provides a detailed account of the scope of activities achieved by Knowing Children, not just as a matter of historical record but in the hope that this will provide a starting point for discussion about how Judith’s vision and legacy can best be carried forward.
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Notes
- 1.
The other members of the committee were Junita Upadhyay, Kritsana Pimonsaengsuriya, Henk van Beers, Mattias Bryneson, Manuel Finelli and Dominique Pierre Plateau.
- 2.
Article 34 of the CRC runs as follows: States Parties undertake to protect the child from all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. For these purposes, States Parties shall in particular take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent the following: (a) the inducement or coercion of a child to engage in any unlawful sexual activity, (b) the exploitative use of children in prostitution or other unlawful sexual practices and (c) the exploitative use of children in pornographic performances and materials. The optional protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography was adopted by General Assembly resolution A/RES/54/263 of 25 May 2000 and entered into force on 18 January 2002.
- 3.
Vicknasingam Balasingam is an Associate Professor at Universiti Sains Malaysia, George Town, Malaysia, and is a specialist in clinical pharmacology, psychiatry and addiction medicine. Bawany Chinapan is a Lecturer in psychology and Counsellor at HELP University College, Kuala Lumpur. They made strong contributions to the work of Knowing Children, both as board members and as researchers.
- 4.
A ‘shadow report’ cannot technically be submitted to the UN until the government in question has submitted its official report, and it transpired that Malaysia (among other countries) was behindhand in making its submission. Furthermore, the Committee itself was said to be several years behind studying the reports already submitted, and for these reasons, the children’s report was ultimately not submitted.
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van Beers, H., Lim, J., Waterson, R. (2017). Judith Ennew and the Knowing Children Project. In: Invernizzi, A., Liebel, M., Milne, B., Budde, R. (eds) ‘Children Out of Place’ and Human Rights . Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33251-2_11
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