Chapter 1: An Introduction: Our Journey to Unlock the Ethics of Research With Children

This project is personal. I am a researcher whose primary participant group is children, and I have sat on and chaired a research ethics board (REB). I understand the reason for ethical oversight but have always questioned the reliance on assumptions that the process is riddled with. It creates a foundation for the design and delivery of research that is anachronistic, patriarchal, colonial, one dimensional and adult centred. The result – an ethical framework that is uncomfortably out of step with the participant group it is set up to ‘protect’ – undermining researcher choice and methodological design and stifling both the protection and ultimately the effective participation of child participants.