Researching violence with children: experiences and lessons from the UK and South Africa

Researching violence with children: experiences and lessons from the UK and South Africa

Radford, L., Meinck, F., Lombard, Katz, E., and Mahati, S. (2017). Researching violence with children: Experiences and lessons from the UK and South Africa. Families, Relationships and Societies. Families, Relationships and Societies. [https://doi.org/10.1332/204674317X14861128190401]

Abstract:
The impact of violence on children’s health and development has had growing attention in global and national politics. Research on children’s experiences of violence has increased in recent years, and this article aims to add to this literature by highlighting key messages and learning points from the experiences of researchers who have worked with children and violence across the different contexts of the UK and South Africa. As qualitative and quantitative researchers, our concepts, aims, methods, resources and approaches were very different, but we all faced similar challenges in working with children and violence in contexts where adults’ views about what violence counted predominated. We argue that children’s participation in research and highlighting children’s own understandings, agency and negotiations in relation to violence are crucial for challenging sometimes unhelpful taken-for-granted views about the impact of violence on children’s lives.

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About Stanford Mahati

Stanford Mahati is a postdoctoral fellow at the African Centre for Migration & Society, University of the Witwatersrand. His current research is funded by the Wellcome Trust and is part of the Migration and Health Project (maHp).

A ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius “Settling Into Motion” alumni he earned his PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He specializes in issues of child migration, transnational migration families, child work, children’s sexualities, sociology of health, qualitative methods, rural livelihoods, designing and evaluating interventions targeting vulnerable children and their households.

In 2014-15, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR), University of Cape Town. He conducted research on the “the functioning and consequences of transnational child raising arrangements in South and North: Angolan, Nigerian and Ghanaian migrant parents living in South Africa and the Netherlands (TCRA-SAN)”.

Stanford has worked as a researcher and consultant for a number of local and international agencies in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

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