The pickle in the jar & other stories: social and spatial dimensions of safety, risk and rights of boys who have displayed harmful sexual behaviours

Abstract

This study explores everyday experiences of boys aged 13-18 who have displayed Harmful Sexual Behaviour (HSB) to consider social and spatial dynamics of safety, risk and children’s rights. This challenges gaps in research and practice that neglect social, physical and relational worlds of young people and the profound influence of social and systemic contexts. This thesis reflects an iterative research journey, illustrated with Riso-printed collages, to reflect layered, multidimensional lives and easily overlooked aspects of everyday life that emerge as significant to safety, risk and rights. Through child-sensitive and rights-respecting research design, the study engages four young people and four practitioners over multiple sessions, through creative mediums including immersive Virtual Reality (VR) technology to traverse space and time, revealing storied experiences embedded in places. Elements of Narrative Inquiry frame analysis leading to a conceptualisation of ‘lifescapes’, landscapes of life, to present storied experiences of everyday life, safety and risk. ‘Lifescape’ spaces include ‘public’ spaces, bedrooms, digital realms, past and future lives, schools and the ‘care system’. One participant’s poignant story of a lonely, rotten pickle in a jar evokes curiosity around the legacies of systemic and practice responses on developing lives. ‘Lifescapes’ reveal a scarcity of safety and invisibility around children’s rights. In stark contrast, risk emerges as ubiquitous, undifferentiated, unarticulated and individualised, at times colliding, leaving young people feeling like ‘risk is everywhere’ and absorbing systemic and self-identities of being ‘a risk’. Dynamics between interconnected contexts emerge as conducive, constricting or collapsing with implications for social and spatial understandings of safety and risk. This thesis concludes by reimagining responses to HSB, shifting from fixing behaviour to flourishing futures, through a commitment to children’s rights with systems becoming like orchestras of duty bearers, conducted by the UNCRC, informing new approaches to prevention and intervention.