This paper contributes to debates on problematic, dominant criminological narratives by foregrounding children’s own accounts of the support they need to thrive, informing ongoing efforts to support their individual and moral development. Drawing on community-based, participatory focus groups and individual and small-group interviews with 58 children aged 10–17 attending youth centres in Cambridge (UK), the study departs from deficit-oriented, adult-led explanations that frame children primarily through risk, mental disorders, or criminalisation. The findings rework prevailing criminological intervention approaches in two ways. First, using reflexive thematic analysis, the study centres children’s lived knowledge to identify trust, belonging, voice, agency, relational consistency of care, emotional support, and autonomy as central to what makes interventions trustworthy, accessible, engaging, and effective, whilst overly didactic, rigid, or authoritarian approaches were identified as key barriers to participation and effectiveness. These accounts move beyond adult assumptions about children’s needs, showing that effective support is grounded in relational, dialogic, autonomy-supportive environments rather than deficit-oriented models. Second, the paper argues that centring children’s perspectives is necessary but not sufficient: interventions must also be theoretically informed and evidence based. Rather than treating participatory and evidence-informed approaches as competing paradigms, the study offers data supporting their integration, combining child-centred qualitative insight with theoretically specified explanations of behaviour. Implications are discussed for the ongoing development of the school-based SATNAV:Compass youth intervention programme. This reconstruction of recommended intervention design approaches retains the strengths of existing traditions whilst addressing their limitations, offering a direction for future intervention research and practice.
This study examines experiences of physical violence among adolescent boys and girls, focusing on how incident location, perpetrator relationship, and disclosure change over time. Using data from the Malmö Individual and Neighborhood Development Study (MINDS), a sample of Swedish adolescents was followed across three waves spanning the transition from compulsory to upper secondary school. A longitudinal approach was used to assess changes in exposure and its contexts for boys and girls. Overall exposure declined significantly among girls, while the decline among boys was smaller and not statistically significant. Among boys who experienced violence, incidents became more likely to occur in public settings and to involve unknown perpetrators, while incidents in semi-public environments such as schools became less common. Among girls, victimization in private settings also increased over time. However, interaction analyses indicated that the only contextual trajectory that differed significantly between boys and girls was the increase in public location victimization. Across waves, semi-public peer settings remained the most common context of victimization for both boys and girls. Disclosure patterns were stable, with most adolescents reporting incidents to informal sources and little change in formal reporting. A small subgroup experienced repeated victimization across waves, with contextual characteristics largely similar to those observed among adolescents victimized only once. The findings suggest different developmental patterns for boys and girls, with declining exposure among girls and an increasing occurrence of victimization in public settings among boys.
This article argues that producing research based on biographical narratives with incarcerated women in the Peruvian Andes requires a methodological orientation that is not only participatory but also mobile, to respond to the structural and institutional constraints of prison life. It conceptualises methodology in movement as a practice that unsettles standard methodological paths by foregrounding adaptation to women’s needs within the prison context. The article develops this framework through a reflective methodological analysis of Ñawiykita Kichariy (Open your eyes!), a collaborative biographical project carried out with twelve women deprived of liberty at the Establecimiento Penitenciario Cusco Mujeres, located in the Peruvian Andes, which produced a book, a podcast, and a participatory photographic experience. Rather than presenting the project as a case study, the article uses it as an analytic site to examine how methodological decisions emerge through continuous negotiation with institutional constraints and participants’ needs. The framework builds on feminist decolonial criminology, intersectional, and participatory traditions, and centres on four interconnected mechanisms: iterative biographical rewriting, in which consent is practised continuously rather than obtained once; multilingual and multimodal adaptation, which extended authorship beyond written Spanish to oral testimony in Quechua, writing in Russian, and the composition of a song; participatory photography, which made expressible what written narrative could not reach; and collective workshops, in which participants negotiated a shared identity addressed to the society outside prison. The article offers a transferable framework for participatory biographical work in carceral and other high-constraint research settings, and establishes this work as a valid form of knowledge production under conditions of structural silencing.
This article addresses a theoretical gap in victimology by examining forms of victimisation in which harm has no clear endpoint and survivorship cannot be understood as a post-trauma condition. Drawing on participatory storytelling with displaced Ukrainian women resettled in the UK following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it develops the concept of perpetual survivorship to describe a temporally open state in which loss, uncertainty, care, agency and adaptation coexist. Using a community-based, trauma-informed methodology grounded in Performative Social Sciences, data were generated through a filmed collaborative storytelling workshop involving 12 Ukrainian refugee women in Cambridge. The narratives were analysed thematically, focusing on identity, motherhood, care, trauma, resilience and future uncertainty. The findings highlight both the substantive and methodological value of participatory storytelling. By allowing participants greater control over how and when they shared their experiences, the approach revealed nuanced forms of agency and vulnerability that might remain hidden within more researcher-led methods. Participatory storytelling is therefore conceptualised not as therapy, but as a relational space for collective recognition, public testimony and alternative knowledge production. Substantively, the study demonstrates that the “cost of crossing” is not confined to the act of migration itself. Rather, displacement constitutes an ongoing, relational condition that begins before physical movement, continues through everyday experiences of survival, and extends into uncertain futures. Agency and vulnerability emerge simultaneously rather than sequentially. The article therefore proposes perpetual survivorship as a framework for understanding survival as a continuous process enacted under conditions where the consequences of harm remain active and the future remains unresolved.
Femicide has emerged as an urgent and escalating human rights issue in Turkey, with increasing rates of gender-based killings despite existing legal frameworks. Media representations play a pivotal role in shaping public perceptions and institutional responses to this violence. This study examines femicide representation in Turkish media through a qualitative thematic analysis of 156 news articles—137 from Sözcü and 19 from Hürriyet—published between September 2024 and March 2025. These ideologically divergent newspapers were selected to explore how differing political stances shape the portrayal of gender-based violence. The articles were retrieved using the keyword “kadın cinayetleri” (femicide) from each newspaper's online archive, and all relevant items were included without selection bias. A rigorous qualitative coding process was employed with intercoder agreement protocols to ensure analytical consistency. Using a purposive corpus of 156 reports (Sözcü n=137; Hürriyet n=19, Sept 2024–Mar 2025), the analysis identifies normalization, legal impunity, and emotional framing as dominant patterns across coverage. Themes such as the normalization of violence, legal impunity, and emotional framing were identified and categorized. The analysis reveals how media narratives often reinforce patriarchal norms through victim-blaming and emotional sensationalism, thereby reflecting and perpetuating broader cultural practices rooted in gender inequality. The findings highlight patterns consistent with weakened legal deterrence and underscore the urgent need for legal reform, societal reeducation, and institutional accountability. This study contributes to feminist media studies and gender-based violence literature by offering a critical lens on media narratives, legal shortcomings, and the ideological framing of femicide in Turkey.
