Screening for Parental Consent? Trans Youth and Informed Consent in Academic Research

Informed consent has been widely discussed and debated in methodological literature. When it comes to conducting research with those under the age of 16, the general rule that UK university ethics committees tend to follow is that parental consent should be sought. In this article, I discuss my experience researching with transgender young people: a group who may find parental consent particularly problematic. I discuss the ethical challenges involved in ensuring that young people are able to give informed consent when parental consent may not be safe to obtain. This article advances sociological research by evaluating the use of a ‘screening process’ to assess whether it is safe for a young person to obtain consent from their parents. While a screening process has ethical benefits as it avoids excluding young people who cannot obtain parental consent safely, I argue that a screening process is not necessarily the best way forward as it does little to overcome key inherent issues with mandatory parental consent: namely the assumptions about the age at which one is deemed as competent to give consent. I argue that more productive conversations are needed about how to ensure that young people can consent to taking part in research when parental consent is not possible, especially in the context of online research.