Revising the Language of the New Zealand Youth Rights Caution to Support Understanding Among Young People

<p>Many young people in New Zealand will engage in antisocial behaviour during their teenage years. Consequently, many young people will interact with the police. When young people speak to police, they are read the Child/Young Persons Rights Caution (the Youth Caution) which informs them of the rights they are entitled to (legal rights), such as choosing to stay silent and speaking with a lawyer. However, many young people have an incomplete understanding of their rights as the Youth Caution does not support complete understanding. An explanation for this incomplete understanding is the language within the Youth Caution is too complex for young people. The current study sought to address this issue by creating and piloting a revised youth caution which aimed to be simpler and easier for young people to understand. Three research questions were addressed in this study: 1) What was young people’s level of understanding of their legal rights? 2) Would the revised youth caution improve the level of legal rights understanding? 3) Would understanding of legal rights increase with age? To answer these questions, young people (aged 10-18 years) were recruited from schools and the community (n = 101). Their legal rights understanding levels were then assessed, based on hearing either the standard or the revised youth caution. The results in relation to the research questions showed participants’ legal rights understanding was incomplete, the revised youth caution did not improve understanding across any aspects of legal rights understanding and understanding increased with age. These results suggest simplifying the language within the Youth Caution is not sufficient to support young people’s understanding, and legislation could offer further support, such as requiring a lawyer to be present as the default option when young people are speaking to the police.</p>

Revising the Language of the New Zealand Youth Rights Caution to Support Understanding Among Young People

<p>Many young people in New Zealand will engage in antisocial behaviour during their teenage years. Consequently, many young people will interact with the police. When young people speak to police, they are read the Child/Young Persons Rights Caution (the Youth Caution) which informs them of the rights they are entitled to (legal rights), such as choosing to stay silent and speaking with a lawyer. However, many young people have an incomplete understanding of their rights as the Youth Caution does not support complete understanding. An explanation for this incomplete understanding is the language within the Youth Caution is too complex for young people. The current study sought to address this issue by creating and piloting a revised youth caution which aimed to be simpler and easier for young people to understand. Three research questions were addressed in this study: 1) What was young people’s level of understanding of their legal rights? 2) Would the revised youth caution improve the level of legal rights understanding? 3) Would understanding of legal rights increase with age? To answer these questions, young people (aged 10-18 years) were recruited from schools and the community (n = 101). Their legal rights understanding levels were then assessed, based on hearing either the standard or the revised youth caution. The results in relation to the research questions showed participants’ legal rights understanding was incomplete, the revised youth caution did not improve understanding across any aspects of legal rights understanding and understanding increased with age. These results suggest simplifying the language within the Youth Caution is not sufficient to support young people’s understanding, and legislation could offer further support, such as requiring a lawyer to be present as the default option when young people are speaking to the police.</p>

Responding and Reflecting on Child Rights

The series of Rejuvenate dialogues are intended to foster debate across a community of practice working on child and youth rights. Our first dialogue examined the principles that can help support child and youth-centred research and community development. During the dialogue, we highlighted two key REJUVENATE principles: the importance of relationships, and the energy that young people can contribute to building new visions of the future. We met online on 14th September 2021. Presenters and participants joined from around the world, reflecting the diversity and breadth of experience in the field. We invited reflection on what the REJUVENATE principles get right, where they need to expand, and what they could improve on.

Foster Youth Perspectives: How Foster Youth Navigate and Mobilize Their Rights within the Foster Care System

This paper explores the grounded realities of how foster youth attempt to improve their own lives by navigating the foster care system. From 2014 to 2016 in southern California, I conducted life history interviews with eight foster youth; interviewed two legal representatives; administered questionnaires to two social workers; and conducted participant observation. Referencing the California Foster Care Bill of Rights and deploying the legal mobilization model, interviews with foster youth focused on their perceptions about rights and how they seek redress for violations to their rights. Their experiences expose the system’s preoccupation with bureaucratic procedures, rather than teaching or acknowledging specific or written rights. Interlocutors aggregately experienced forty rights violations, variously responding with the following modes of action: Doing nothing; Non-Legal action; and Formal-Legal action. In all instances, their knowledge (or lack thereof) about their rights and the foster care system critically informed their actions and revealed their awareness of the power dynamics within the system. This case study centers foster youth perspectives and narratives which are important for identifying effective alternatives that ensure foster youth rights, mobilization for when rights are violated, and ultimately center their voices and power.

Distractions and Defractions: Using Parental Rights to Fight Against the Educational Rights of Transgender, Nonbinary, and Gender Diverse Students

In recent years, conservative advocates have obscured their transphobia by framing their concerns as religiously-based parental rights claims. They have advocated for limitations on youth rights to gender identity self-determination. This article examines policy debates over transgender-inclusive practices in schools, including conservative demands for parental notification and limitations on healthcare access for transgender youth. I suggest that schools ought to be more concerned with children’s or students’ rights to help enable diverse students to flourish and become who they are in supportive schools. This shift would move schools away from the distractions of conservative parental rights claims and re-focus them instead on the needs of students.

Learning from a Living Archive: Rejuvenating Child and Youth Rights and Participation

This paper reflects the findings of the first phase of the REJUVENATE project, which set out to understand and map approaches to integrating children, youth, and community participation in child rights initiatives. We did this through a scoping of existing practitioner and academic literature (developing a project-based literature review matrix), a mapping of key actors, and the development of a typology of existing approaches. All three of these elements were brought together into a ‘living archive’, which is an evolving database that currently comprises 100 matrices, and a ‘collection’ of key field practitioners (many of whom we have interviewed for this project). In this paper we: (1) present a user-friendly summary of the existing tradition of substantive children’s participation in social change work; (2) share case studies across various sectors and regions of the world; (3) highlight ongoing challenges and evidence gaps; and (4) showcase expert opinions on the inclusion of child rights and, in particular, child/youth-led approaches in project-based work.

From adverse childhood experiences to wellbeing: Portfolios of resilience

Resilience has always been present across human history, as we have contended with the wide array of adversities. Resilience research has gained significantly increasing momentum as a core principle of the trauma-informed approach to service. Resilience research supports not only targeting psychopathology symptom reduction, but also recognizing a portfolio of resilience components to harness in youth interventions. The present discussion considers the innovative research work of Hamby and colleagues (2020) in terms of their portfolio of resilience model and current evidence for a dual-factor model of social support (social support seeking and social support receiving). Social support is a frequent intervention component, particularly in developing help-seeking skills, within youth programming. Their findings support this factorial approach that considers the giving-receiving experience, and how the four categories of Interconnected, Rebuffed, Tended, and Isolated may relate to differing resilience profiles. This research raises important questions for future work in terms of the fit between seeking and receiving that places the youth centrally in this consideration. Youths’ journey from trauma to resilience in a way that validates their portfolio of resilience assets, strengths, and potential is central to a trauma-informed approach to youth well-being, as well as how we negotiate youth rights with our developmental, clinical and health responsibilities.

The formation of health-preserving competence of future specialists of information and communication specialties by means of physical education

The concepts of «health saving competence», «healthy lifestyle», «value for health» and «interactive technologies» have been considered in the article. The problem of formation of health-saving competence of future specialists of information and telecommunication specialties in the process of vocational training by means of physical education at the present stage of development of pedagogical science is characterized. The importance of comprehensive students’ preparation is revealed, because its level has a significant influence on reducing the period of mastery of the specialty, on the increase of labor productivity, on the increase of professional mobility. In this regard, the socio-economic importance of qualitative training of highly qualified specialists, whose work in the context of modern scientific and technological progress is of particular importance, is increasing. The problem of research of theoretical and methodological foundations of formation of health-saving competence of future specialists of information and telecommunication technologies in the process of vocational training by means of physical education at the present stage of development of pedagogical science becomes of important scientific educational and social importance. The list of tasks of higher education institutions, both public and private, include: solving the problem of supporting and strengthening the health of student youth, creating an atmosphere of health saving in the system of their study, providing social and psychological physical and health assistance, i.e. improving the system of measures on implementation and protection of youth rights, which is clearly defined in the Constitution of Ukraine and the Law of Ukraine «On Higher Education».

Multimodal Discourse on BRICS Produced by Diverse Stakeholders: Identifying Attitudes, Cultures and Perspectives

The paper explores the conceptual vision of BRICS in the contemporary world. The study focuses on language and images that are used within BRICS-related institutional communication. We argue that the research is important because of the increasing impact of BRICS on the development of the multilateral and multipolar world. The research aims to offer preliminary considerations with regard to key topics, features and tools of multimodal discourse that comes from the BRICS nations and representatives of other international/regional organisations. This area has not been subject to academic analysis so far. This confirms the novelty of the present study. The research material includes 600 image-text correlated items from BRICS official sources of information and from organisation and institutions, which are not affiliated with the BRICS and refer to national or international actors. The research combined theoretical analysis of literature, empirical investigation of materials within qualitative paradigm, through content-based analysis and manual coding on thematic and pragmatic criteria. The findings reveal different approaches to BRICS that are introduced by different actors through specific coordination of verbal and visual tools, in explicit and implicit ways. The findings show that BRICS sources contain proportioned use of texts and photos of high-ranking official events, socio-cultural features of BRICS countries, and pictures of youth with regard to BRICS mission, values, goals, and policies. This strengthens the concept of equality and human rights provision in the modern world in general and leads to the understanding of the need to include the issues of youth rights and their equality on the BRICS agenda in an explicit way.