Editorial: Surveillance, Children and Childhood

Abstract

In a sense, to be a child is to be under surveillance. Parents watch their children to keep them safe and to correct their behaviour. Teachers keep an eye on students to enforce classroom rules and to maintain discipline. Managers of shopping malls and many other semi-public places use a variety of methods to keep young people under control in order to maintain those spaces for adult usage, sensibilities and consumption. Depending on age, which is critical in this context, it can be argued that surveillance as care is a necessary condition of nurturing and educating children and young people.

Children, Urban Care, and Everyday Pavements

“…Second, recognising children's role as urban carers, the paper resists the common Euro-American gesture of placing children into a spatial realm of their own, seeing them instead as taking part in what pioneering children's geographer Ward (1978, page 204) called a 'shared city'-"a city where children live in the same world as [adults] rather than a city where unwanted patches are set aside to contain … their activities." Children's presence in urban spaces evokes perennial debates about their 'proper' place in cities (Baldwin, 2002;Gagen, 2004;Gutman and de Coninck-Smith, 2008;Jain, 2006;Norton, 2007;Valentine, 1996), and there is increasing evidence that children's mobility has become severely circumscribed due to a widespread culture of risk aversion in current societies (see Barker et al, 2009;Fotel and Thomsen, 2004;Steeves and Jones, 2010). At the same time, however, there is also a more affirmative strand of research that stresses the diverse but often unrecognised ways in which children are already using urban spaces to express their own agencies and sociabilities (see Aitken, 2001;Christensen and O'Brien, 2003;Cloke and Jones, 2005;Duff, 2010).…”

The 'named person': surveillance and the wellbeing of children and young people in Scotland.

“…Children are increasingly the subjects of surveillance (Marx and Steeves 2010). This can be both as victims and as threats (Steeves and Jones 2010). Even if they are generally spared the almost prison-like environment of some US public schools, Scottish children are familiar with CCTV systems in playgrounds and corridors and staff are well acquainted with the bureaucratic surveillance of auditable outcomes (Apple 2010).…”

Idealet om det glade og afstemte barn: Pædagogers blik for trivsel i børnehaven

“…På mange måder er det at vaere et barn ensbetydende med at vaere under overvågning, idet foraeldre, paedagoger og laerere holder opsyn med børn, hvad enten formålet er sikkerhed, at regler bliver overholdt eller disciplin, og i løbet af de sidste 10-20 år har udvikling af en raekke nye overvågningsteknikker (video, webcam, diasshow med fotos taget dagen igennem i børnehaven) gjort det endnu svaerere for børn at finde voksenfri steder (Steeves & Jones, 2010). Et etnografisk studie af overvågningspraksis i en skotsk underskole konkluderer, at den faktiske overvågningspraksis i skolen adskilte sig fra den oprindelige panoptiske tanke på to afgørende måder: overvågningen var ikke total, men foregik periodisk og afbrudt, og den fandt ikke kun sted ved brug af synet, men ligeså meget ved hjaelp af lyd og hørelse (Gallagher, 2010).…”