About the Meanings, Barriers and Practices of Child Participation: Reflections on the Seventh Section of the National Strategy for Children

Abstract

In 2012 in Russia, an attempt was made at the legislative level to recognize the subjectivity of the child. In the National Strategy for Children, in force in 2012–2017, a seventh section was about the participation of children. Despite the six-year period of active existence of this document, it is difficult to consider the prevailing understanding of child participation in solving both personal and public issues. The research question is the search for the meanings of child participation and the barriers to its implementation associated with the operation of the above document. An array was selected for analysis, including 10 expert interviews, 10 scientific publications and a transcript of the round table 'Mechanisms for realizing the child’s participation in resolving issues affecting his interests'. The study of the selected documents was carried out in the MAXQDA program. For all documents, a unified coding system was developed, including 17 codes and 18 subcodes. MAXQDA tools allowed a comparative analysis of selected articles in the context of codes, volumes and frequency of occurrence of codes in documents, relationships between codes. The socio-­political discourse of participation is a discourse of quasi-­participation, when all adult participants agree with the importance of children expressing their own opinions, but things do not go further than expressing opinions. This is due to the undeveloped mechanisms for including children in resolving various issues. The participation of children has not become the basic principle for building an entire system of measures for childhood. The developers of the National Strategy deviated from the understanding of participation laid down by the Convention.