Representation of children and children’s views in written material

Changes in (the Danish) legislation, mirroring a more general shift in the understanding of children towards recognizing children as competent agents and right holders, have led to a wider focus on children’s participation in decision making regarding their lives e.g. in family law cases. The focus on children’s participation is visible in both the practice and research fields. However not much research nor practice development has focused on how children’s views are represented in the written material.
This paper presents findings from an ongoing research and development project on children’s participation and the everyday life of children in family law cases in Denmark. The research part of the project sets out to study how children’s welfare/distress and coping capacity unfold in the interplay between their parent’s separation, the children’s everyday life and the family law system. In order to produce qualitative in-depth knowledge on this, the project will generate and analyze a comprehensive empirical material consisting of; document analysis of 100 anonymous child interview records, observation of 50 child interviews, brief field work of 1–2 days’ duration in each of the 50 cases with observations and informal conversations, semi-structured interviews with children and parents as well as follow-up observations and interviews after 6–12 months.
This paper elaborates on the analysis of 100 anonymous child interview records. Drawing on insights from agential realism, we explore how the written material, the child interview records, are powerful documents that can either subsidize or undermine the children’s views. The analysis e.g. show that the child appears as standardized in the child interview records and the individual child seems less visible. The paper thus calls for more attention to be given to the written material as key to understanding the positioning of children and children’s views in family law cases as well as other similar fields were decisions concerning children’s lives are made.