When protection becomes exclusion: Ethics governance, adolescent capacity and the limits of procedural oversight in sexuality research

This article examines how procedural research ethics governance constrains rather than enables meaningful participation in adolescent sexuality research. Drawing on reflexive analysis of a qualitative study exploring sexuality conversations between adolescents and their LGBTQ+ parent(s) in South Africa, it identifies four sites of governance conflict where institutional frameworks, designed to protect young participants, functioned instead to exclude adolescent voices from knowledge production about their own experiences. Participant responses, including sophisticated confidentiality reasoning, independent navigation of research boundaries and requests to use the research relationship for family communication, consistently exceeded the capacities that institutional governance assumed they lacked. A structural contradiction between the Children’s Act, which recognises adolescent sexual decision-making capacity from age 12, and university ethics requirements mandating parental consent until age 18, reveals how governance frameworks can enact institutional coloniality rather than genuine protection. Four evidence-based governance recommendations are proposed, alongside implications for ethics committee training and a future research agenda. These contributions address the persistent gap between procedural compliance and situated ethical practice in research with young participants on sensitive topics, with particular attention to how ethics review bodies can better account for participant capacity, relational context and cultural responsiveness.