Troubling understandings of childhood competence in research ethics governance processes: Implications for research with children and their families

2024 marked the centenary of the 1924 Declaration on the Rights of the Child. The adoption of this declaration by the League of Nations provided the launching pad for the establishment of a global children’s rights movement which resulted in foregrounding children’s wellbeing at key global fora during the 20th century. While the concept of children’s rights has expanded in the 100 years since the adoption of the declaration, some of the key tenets of the conceptualisation of children’s rights within this declaration remain evident in dominant children’s rights discourses today. Specifically, there remains a clear distinction between children and adults which situates the state of adulthood as being everything that those within the childhood phase of life lack – autonomy, maturity, competence, and knowledge of the world. These systems are not only evident in educational settings and the approaches adopted by governmental and non-governmental agencies (national and international); they are also identifiable within the higher education sector, most notably in Western Europe and North America, through, for instance, ethics governance procedures or procedural ethics frameworks which are best characterised by research ethics committees/IRBs. The inclusion of such a vision of childhood in university ethics regimes which, then, informs ethical standards that need to be met by researchers seeking to undertake research with children is problematic because not all cultures, including some within Western European and North American contexts, make the same distinctions between the state of adulthood and the state of childhood and consequently, they do not automatically associate incompetence, immaturity and dependency with childhood. This raises more, not less, issues. Therefore, this paper seeks to explore the linkage between dominant children’s rights discourses and procedural ethics frameworks and problematise their understanding of childhood, especially concerning the concept of competence, in contexts where other conceptualisations of childhood exist.