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International Journal of Social Research Methodology

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The Power of Talk: Transformative Possibilities in Researching Violence with Children in South Africa
Jenny Parkes Available online: 11 Sep 2008

To cite this article: Jenny Parkes (2008): The Power of Talk: Transformative Possibilities in Researching Violence with Children in South Africa, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 11:4, 293-306 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645570701401321

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Vol. 11, No. 4, October 2008, 293306

The Power of Talk: Transformative Possibilities in Researching Violence with Children in South Africa
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Jenny Parkes
Received 3 May 2006; Accepted 26 March 2007
TSRM_A_240018.sgm Taylor and Francis Ltd

This article considers the possibilities for change through participation in research. Reflecting on findings from a study of South African young peoples perspectives about violence, it explores how research may have consequencesboth planned and unintendedfor its participants. For example, in the course of this study, verbal problem solving and collaboration increasingly replaced systems of punishment as childrens preferred solutions to problems of violence. The article considers how elements of the research process and, in particular, the subtle interplay of power and pleasure, generated shifts in perspectives. It reflects on the ethical implications for participatory research with children, including the tension between empowerment within and marginalisation outside the research space, and discusses the implications for researchers in general and for interventions which seek to work with young people to contest violence.
j.parkes@ioe.ac.uk JennyParkes 0000002007 00 Taylor 2007 & Francis Original Article 1364-5579 (print)/1464-5300 International Journal of Social Research 10.1080/13645570701401321(online) Methodology

Introduction: Childrens Participation in Research

I dont think anywhere is safe to play because like for instance in parks then the people that drink, they sit there and then they like watch you the whole time what you do or where you walk, places you walk, and then they follow you and then they can do all sorts of things. So I dont think anywhere is safe to play. (Shandre, age 13) And like, one night I heard gun shots going off right there And I just sat and I locked my door because everyone was sleeping and then I was I just locked the door and I sat there. (David, age 13)
Jenny Parkes completed her Ph.D. at the University of London, Institute of Education, in June 2005. She has recently completed an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at the Institutes Thomas Coram Research Unit, focusing on childrens engagements with violence, and is a Lecturer in Education, Gender and International Development at the Institute of Education. Correspondence to: Jenny Parkes, Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AA, UK. Tel: (020) 7612 6557; Email: j.parkes@ioe.ac.uk ISSN 13645579 (print)/ISSN 14645300 (online) 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13645570701401321

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The above extracts, drawn from a recent study of young peoples perspectives about violence in South Africa (Parkes, 2005, pp. 80, 96), illustrate ways in which violence disempowers children, restricting their freedoms in the neighbourhood. Listening to children talking about these experiences evokes a range of emotions in the researcher anger, distress, a fierce desire to protect or to rescue. As a researcher in such a context, there is a clear imperative to conduct research which will help to create a safer social world for children. But could it be that this desire, well intentioned as it may be, is not always in childrens best interests? Perhaps it too quickly casts children into the role of victim, divesting them of agency, and foreclosing the possibility that they may be able to contribute to transforming the social world (Boyden, 2003, p. 16). Alternatively, there is the possibility that this desire to strive for change can generate research which engages children directly, in reflecting on and beginning to transform the violence of their social worlds. The study discussed in this article was not designed with these transformatory goals, and yet in the course of the research children appeared increasingly to believe that through discussion and collaboration they could solve problems of violence, together with others in the neighbourhood. The proposition discussed in this article is that participation in research may change perspectives, often without the researcher being aware of or intending for this to happen. The article considers in particular the agentic power of talk, within the constraints of a violent and disempowering social context, and raises questions about the relationship between talk and action. It traces elements in the research which may have produced the changes, focusing in particular on the dynamics of power and pleasure. This identification of a powerpleasure dimension has implications for current theories of agency in social research. The article concludes by considering how research can be seen as empowering, or as a false promise, and discusses the implications of these interpretations for future research and for violence prevention programmes and interventions with young people. Theorising Agency and Change in Social Research Approaches to research with children have in recent years increasingly acknowledged the importance of listening to children and understanding young people as active agents in their own development (Alderson, 2000; Christensen & James, 2000; Greene & Hogan, 2005; Mayall, 2002; Woodhead & Faulkner, 2000). Concerns that adult data gathering techniques will block or distort the perspectives of children have led researchers to seek creative methods of actively engaging children in the research process (Boyden & Ennew, 1997; Greene & Hogan, 2005). Recently, these participatory approaches have also begun to filter through to studies which seek childrens views about the violence they experience (Barter & Renold, 2003; Burman, Brown, & Batchelor, 2003; Irwin, 2004; Mullender et al., 2002). There has been a growing emphasis on listening to children, in order to influence change at a policy and practice level. Some researchers have drawn on participative traditions of enquiry to conduct studies which involve children actively in planning and implementing interventions, for example, to improve the local environment (Clark, 2004; Dallape & Gilbert, 1993; Driskell,

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2002; Hart, 1997; Johnson et al., 1998; OKane, 2000). Transformation, in the sense of enhancing the agency of children to contribute to decision making that concerns them, is a central and explicit goal of much of this work. Developed as a way of empowering people in impoverished and marginalised neighbourhoods, the shared goals of these approaches are described in the editorial of the journal, Participatory Learning and Action, as: the full participation of people in the processes of learning about their needs and opportunities, and in the action required to address them. Influenced by humanist and liberationist ideologies, participatory approaches: hold strongly the vision that people can learn to be self-reflexive about their world and their action within it (Reason, 1998, p. 280). Through their participation in research, it is reasoned that people will become more aware of, and reflexive about, their own marginal social position and therefore better able collectively to begin to challenge this position. In other words, participation in research will increase their reflexive agency. But the assumptions, first, that the voicing of perspectives will universally and inevitably make people more reflexive about their own social position, and, second, that increasing reflexivity generates change, merit interrogation. While the expression of and sharing of views could conceivably generate insights into ones own social position in some circumstances, this cannot be assumed. Alternatively, it might be predicted that voicing perspectives, particularly if shared without challenge or discordance, will be more likely to reinforce existing viewpoints, leading therefore to continuity rather than to change. Such a perspective is consistent with the notion of habitus, developed by Pierre Bourdieu to explore how social relations within a field (educational, cultural, social, economic and so on) are incorporated within emotions, beliefs and actions, or habitus: embodied history, internalised as second nature and so forgotten as historyis the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 56). However, while participatory enquiry may sometimes overstate the possibilities for research generating agency and social change, it may be possible to use Bourdieus concepts to understand how, in some circumstances, participation in research has transformative potential. Feminist researchers have developed Bourdieus ideas to explore how gender norms are at the same time durable but not immutable, and how change may be possible (Adkins, 2002; McLeod, 2005; McNay, 2000). Lois McNay argues that the concept of habitus denotes not just the passive process of sedimentation of norms on the body, but also the moment of praxis, or the living through of those norms. This living through is an active, dynamic and open-ended process, in which individuals, operating at the same time in multiple fields, negotiate complex relations of power as they move within and between fields of social action. Agency, in McNays analysis, lies in the capacity to manage actively the often discontinuous, overlapping or conflicting relations of power (McNay, 2000, p. 16). Drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, she argues that people negotiate these conflicts through a narrative process; they make sense of disparate events through constructing narratives, which are organised temporally with sequences of events culminating into a coherent and meaningful structure (what Ricoeur terms emplotment) (Lawler, 2002; Ricoeur, 1983). For

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McNay this process of actively managing discordance and conflict through narrative has the potential to increase reflexive agency. McNays (2000) analysis locates human agency firmly within social relations, but offers possibilities for transformation. The extracts of childrens talk with which this article opened illustrate how neighbourhood violence constrains the agency of children. With a long history of racial discrimination and continuing socio-economic disparities, as well as the lesser status of childhood, children may have few opportunities to contribute to contesting and changing violent social relations, and may be more likely to reproduce these relations in their own beliefs and practices. Yet, McNays analysis opens up the possibility that, as children narrate and try to make sense of their experiences of violence, they may become more reflexive about their own social positions, and they may begin to challenge these positions. Drawing on these ideas, this article asks whether it is possible that engagement in research might provide opportunities for children to construct narratives which contest as well as reproduce violence. It asks whether such narratives may have any significance for childrens lives beyond the limited setting of the research relationship, or whether the material constraints of the social setting far exceed and undermine the power of talk to produce change. In order to address these questions, I begin by describing the context of the research and then consider the changes in childrens perspectives observed in the course of the study. The Research The research took place in South Africa, seven years after the first elections in 1994 heralded the advent of democracy and ended the brutal and repressive apartheid regime. Apartheid and colonialism have left a legacy of continuing disparities, and rates of violent crime are amongst the highest in the world, particularly in poorer communities, in which people are 80 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than in affluent neighbourhoods (Hamber, 2000). The study was located in a primary school in a working class neighbourhood of Cape Town, created under apartheid to provide segregated housing for people designated coloured. Families faced multiple social stresses, with high rates of unemployment, substance abuse, extensive gangsterism and criminal and domestic violence (Jones Peterson & Carolissen, 2000). Employing a social constructionist epistemology, the study explored how children made sense of the multiple forms of violence they experienced in their daily lives, tracing how violence could be perpetuated and contested in the beliefs and practices of children (Parkes, 2007; Parkes, in publication). The methodology drew on ethnographic and participatory research approaches, but, unlike participatory action research, it was not designed to generate transformation. Methods were selected to interest and engage children, and to facilitate talk about sensitive realms of experience. As a white woman from UK, I was also concerned to reduce the power imbalance arising from my position as researcher, adult and foreigner (Mayall, 2002; Mohanty, 1991). I worked in the school for eight months in 2001, initially emphasising familiarisation and trust building, through my work as a classroom assistant and time observing and interacting with children in the playground, and with parents and teachers.

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Thirty-six children, in three age cohorts (average age 8, 10 and 13 years) were invited to participate in individual interviews and a series of group sessions. The groups were selected by friendship, so that trusting relationships were established both with the researcher and with co-participants, and by sex, on the basis that children might find it easier to discuss sensitive issues in single sex groups. Individual interviews were semi-structured, with open-ended questions on the themes of social relationships, conflict and violence in the school, neighbourhood and home, and use of active listening, empathy, reflecting back and interpreting to facilitate the expression of ideas (Kvale, 1996). Following an initial interview, I met weekly with groups of six children over a two-month period, using a participatory circle time approach (Mosley, 1996), in which warm up games were followed by structured discussions, and these were facilitated by use of art, music and role play. Groups began by devising ground rules, including agreements that they would listen to each other without interrupting, and that they were free to leave the group at any time. There was some negotiation around the choice of methods, with older children often opting for more verbal and younger children more visual methods (Hill, 2006). There was a small action-oriented component, where for example, groups made suggestions for playground improvement, which were shared with the school principal, and they compiled lists of messages about safety, which were fed back to other children, to school staff and to a local violence prevention programme. The research experience differed markedly from the routine life of the children at school. Class sizes were large, with for example, 47 thirteen-year-old children in the class, resources sorely limited and adultchild relationships hierarchical with few opportunities for reciprocity and negotiation in childrens contacts with their teachers. Most of their talk about teachers alluded to disciplinary practices, with teachers expected to keep order through skelling (reprimanding), often with corporal punishment. Discussions in small groups facilitated by an adult were rare, and none had encountered circle time. The scheduling of the interviews and groups over several months fostered the development of collaborative relationships, and meant that, to a limited extent, changes over time could be explored. Post-group interviews were designed to de-brief, marking the ending of the research and enabling children to raise outstanding issues. But, in addition, a few of the questions repeated those from the initial interview, and the analysis of responses to these revealed changes in childrens views about violence over the course of the research. In analysing how childrens talk about violence was both rooted in past and present social relationships, and was at the same time generative, I drew on analytical frameworks from both sociology and critical discursive psychology (Edley, 2001; Wetherell, 1998; Willig, 2001). Since Bourdieus concepts of habitus and field, and the feminist interpretations of this work, provide a way of considering questions of agency within a highly constraining social context (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; McLeod, 2005; McNay, 2000), I engaged increasingly with these ideas in the course of the analysis, for example, in both explaining and in questioning the changes of perspective that appeared to take place in the course of the research.

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Changes over Time in Childrens Talk about Violence In both pre- and post-group interviews, I asked children what might stop problems of violence in the playground and in the neighbourhood, and their responses to these questions changed markedly. Asked in the initial interviews how to stop problems of fighting in the playground, for example, 22 children talked about forms of punishment by an adult, whereas only seven children suggested this in the post-group interview. In contrast, talking it out was mentioned by four children at the initial interview compared with 26 at the post-group interview. At the earlier interviews, children typically proposed verbal or physical punishment by the teacher or the principal (based in the office), or sometimes by parents, as in these responses to my question about what might stop problems of fighting in the playground:
Peter (aged 8): Jenny: Peter: Natalie (8): Jenny: Natalie: Jenny: Natalie: Ramona (13): The teacher. Mm mm. How could she stop the fighting? Send them to the office. By hitting them. [] And who must hit them? His teacher. Aaahhh. Or his Mommy. The principal keeps on telling them but they just go on.

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Children of all ages proposed intervention by adults, but the older children, like Ramona, seemed to have little expectation of the efficacy of these punishments in preventing violence in the future. In group discussions, support for retaliatory violence was widespread, with children justifying hitting when someone lift a hand to them. They did not, however, expect these actions to resolve conflict, and much more often relied on adults to sort out problems. In the post-group interviews, however, the responses were markedly different, with most children proposing problem solving through children talking it out, apologising, making friends, telling another to stop and sometimes with friends helping in this process:
Cassiem (10): Shandre (13): Tariq (13): They must just talk to one another, talk about and then they can be friends again. Sit down if they have a problem with each other they must work it out not fight. Cause fighting doesnt solve everything. Friends take you away and tell you not to fight.

There was a shift in the locus of responsibility for change, with children rather than adults viewed as able to solve problems of violence in the playground and with verbal problem solving rather than physical or verbal punishment. A similarly marked shift was evident in talk about how to solve problems of gang violence in the neighbourhood, with none of the children suggesting talk or verbal persuasion in the initial interviews, compared with 18 in the post-group interviews. In

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the initial interviews, as with playground violence, the most common responses involved punishment by adult authority figures, in this case police or prison:
Ayesha (8): Jenny: Ayesha: Jenny: Ayesha: Ryan (10): Mm Lock them up in jail. Yeah. You could lock them up in jail. And what would happen to them then do you think? Then they must stay for twenty years in prison. Okay. And then what would they be like at the end of twenty years, do you think? Old. Only the police can stop them. They can catch the skollies [gangsters] and then they can put them in jail. Maybe they can change therein jail. How would they change? When they give them a hiding with that thick pole, something like that So you think they should give them a hiding with a thick pole? And then what would happen, do you think? Then they will listen, then they can let them go free, but if they do something wrong again then they can stay in prison for ever.

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Jenny: Ryan: Jenny: Ryan:

Children expressed similar views in group sessions, with some children, particularly in the older groups, proposing the reintroduction of the death penalty (not used in South Africa since 1994): because the people are scared to die so there can be fewer crime in the country (Fatima, aged 13). Children at all ages talked of police and prison, but, as in their cynicism about adult authority in the playground, the older children were similarly doubtful about the likely success of punitive approaches in the neighbourhood:
Jenny: Shandre (13): Tariq: And what could stop that kind of problem from happening? I dont know, cause some people they can go to jail for it and then when they come out then they just do it again. I dont know, when the police come then they, and then they arrest the person and somebody else just do, does it again.

In contrast, in the post-group interviews, as in the playground context, children talked of solving problems through discussion and verbal persuasion:
Jenny: Jacqueline: And what could stop that kind of problem? Maybe if they should tell someone older who can handle the problem and then (Jenny: Yeah.) maybe they can help and they dont need to go out and getdo (Jenny: Yeah.) mischief. So when you say someone older, do you mean another grownup or it could be ? It can be your friend also but that can handle it. Yeah. Or maybe a friend who is a little bit older? Yes. (Jenny: Yeah.) Cause most children dont always want to talk to grownups. Telling people its dangerous to shoot around and people go quick dead and they will go to jail for that. Who will tell them? Children, parents, people.

Jenny: Jacqueline: Jenny: Jacqueline: Louise (8): Jenny: Louise:

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There were therefore clear similarities in the shifts that took place over time in childrens talk about solving problems of violence in the two different contexts. In both, a reliance on punishment by adult authority figures was replaced by an emphasis on talking and reasoning. In the playground context, the shift in agency from adult to child was marked, with children seeing themselves as able to solve problems without adult intervention, but this did not seem to be the case in the neighbourhood, where children continued to refer to police or jail (14 in the pre-group and 16 in the post-group interviews). Similar numbers also expressed doubt that there was any solution to these problems (seven and six). What seemed to change was that the taken-for-granted discourse of adult punishment was supplemented by a more reflexive and dialogic layer, in which the perpetrator of violence might choose to change through talking with others. Who those others might be varied considerably, with some, like Jacqueline, proposing friends, while others continued to view adults, like the Government, parents or the headmaster, as having more persuasive authority:
Clinton (14): Uh, if-if-ifhow can I sayif the police will or the headmaster or the Government can just get all the gangsters into one group and maybe they can talk them out of it. (Jenny: Mm.) Talk some sense into them. I reckon its like that. If you can make it so.

Clinton does not claim that change is easy, but, like many of the children talking at the end of the research period about violence in the neighbourhood and in the playground, he expresses the view that these problems might be solved through the persuasive potential of talk and through reflexive agency, that, enabled to gain insight into his own social position, the gangster or the child fighting in the playground may choose to change. Transformative Processes in the Research: The Interplay of Power and Pleasure Since there were no obvious factors external to the research that could account for these shifts in perspective, it seems likely that they were somehow generated by the research process itself. The most obvious explanation is that new solutions to problems of violence were proposed during the research. For example, in an activity in which children imagined the life story of a gangster, culminating in his punishment or death, they were invited to reflect on different possible endings to the life narrative; in a role play of playground aggression, culminating in fighting and punishment by the teacher, they were invited to act out different possible solutions. Both of these could have had a direct impact on their future reflections on solutions to problems of violence. More often, however, the invitation to change the narrative sequence was indirect, arising from children adapting the verbal problem-solving and collaboration practiced within the group work to solving problems of conflict and violence outside the research setting. Some of this more subtle suggestion was invisible to the researcher as well as the children, and revealed only at a later stage as I tried to make sense retrospectively of the processes that were occurring. A clear example was the change in eight-year-old Odettes talk about solving problems of playground violence. When we first spoke about this, she proposed that the headteacher or parent must sort out disputes, but at the post-group interview she suggested that the child should take action herself: of

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saying please dont do it because I dont like that and I want you to stop doing it. There was a clear echo here of an unplanned discussion that had taken place in a group session, when girls had arrived at the session unhappy because of a playground dispute between Odette and several of the other girls in the group. Because of their distress, I chose to intervene by asking each child to explain what had happened and what they wanted to see happen, and Odettes statement: I would like you to stop calling me names please led to mutual apologies. The close resemblance of her later response about how to solve problems of violence in the playground suggests that three weeks later she remembered and applied this form of conflict resolution. Her solution to problems of neighbourhood violence was less assertive, but equally shifted the responsibility from authority figures to the perpetrators themselves: I think that they must think about that and leave that alone and stop being like that. While the source of this viewpoint cannot easily be traced to a single conversation or activity within the research, it may be more loosely connected with the emphasis on reflection and empowerment within the research relationship. In her solutions to problems of violence in both contexts, there was therefore a marked shift towards reflexive agency. While small shifts in the perspectives of a few children produced by the research relationship might be expected, the marked shifts in the talk of so many of the young people seem surprising. A possible explanation lies in the dynamics of power in the research relationship, first through the exercise of power by the researcher, and second through the pleasure gained by the increasing perception of childrens own exercise of power, or self-efficacy. The theorisation discussed earlier in this article, using the ideas of Bourdieu and McNay, offers a partial but incomplete account of these processes. The research relationship can be seen as a temporary social field, with its own rules and regularities (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Some of the rules contrasted with those of more familiar social fields of classroom or neighbourhood, in particular, the emphasis on children as problem solvers, which sited them in more agentic positions than their relatively powerless locations within the neighbourhood or classroom. The contradictions between the rules of the different settings, following McNays analysis, could create conflict and dissonance, leading children to reflect critically on their own social positions and to increase their reflexive agency (McNay, 2000). But this emphasis on the contrasts between the different social fields may be misleading. While I attempted to erode the power differential between researcher and researched, it inevitably persisted. My white skin, my foreignness and in particular my adulthood, meant that I exercised power within the research setting, and it is highly likely that children modified and adapted their talk in response to what they perceived I might want to hear. Odettes words could be interpreted therefore as reproducing a viewpoint to please me that I had engineered in an earlier session. Although I had made a deliberate effort not to impose my own viewpoints, perhaps my non-verbal prompts and frequent uses of yeah and mm-mm may have conveyed subtle and unintended messages. While I may have refrained from voicing disagreement when children proposed corporal punishment or the reintroduction of the death penalty, my silences could have been interpreted as disagreement or disapproval. As well as considering the power of talk, it is also important to reflect on the power of the unspoken.

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Power within the group was also exercised differentially, with those with more social status, who tended also to be more vocal, appearing to influence the viewpoints of the quieter group members. Several of the 13-year-old boys in the post-group interviews, for example, alluded to remarks made in the group sessions by Clinton and Luke, who were considered popular and streetwise, and embodied the valued attributes of strength, bravery and fighting skill (Parkes, 2007). These reflections on power differentials within the research suggest that the research field, rather than generating dissonance, in some ways reiterated the relationships of the more familiar social fields. Yet, while it is important to recognise the persistence of power differentials, it was also clear that children felt that their opinions were valued and respected. As 13-year-old Jacqueline put it, reflecting on what she had enjoyed in the group: We never argue, like say if you used to work in the class then somebody always trying to be bossy but nobody wanted to be bossy, all of us was just. The perception of self-efficacy was, I suggest, immensely pleasurable, and it is this pleasure that may explain the extent to which children shifted their perspectives. The personal satisfaction Odette gained from discussing and resolving her own conflict in the group may well have been sufficient in itself to account for her future application of the approach to problem solving to other social contexts. But in Odettes comments and in Jacquelines use of the word just, the pleasure appears to derive not just from perceived self-efficacy, but from a sense of collective agency, or social justice. Even the telling of very distressing personal stories, while clearly not pleasurable, may have helped children to feel they had some sort of control, or at least may have helped to render these experiences more manageable (Das & Kleinman, 2000). Eight-year-old Richard, for example, talked with me four times in the course of the research about how his 12-year-old sister was gang raped. On the first occasion he told me they did already rob, rob my sister they cut open her pantyhose. In subsequent discussions, the narrative became increasingly clear and coherent, and Richard told me how a group of men had approached and attacked her here in the corner, here by the school, how they did rape my sister, how a woman had heard her screams and gone to help, and the support she had received afterwards from a priest and her mother. His use of the word rape at the second telling may well have stemmed from a group discussion when one of the boys had already talked about the problem of rape, giving him the vocabulary and perhaps the permission to draw on this language. His repeated telling of the story may have illustrated both how he was haunted by the incident, and how there was some perceived benefit for him in talking with a trusted adult, perhaps in helping to come to terms with events, for, as Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman explain: one of the struggles of survivors is to find the means of re-establishing authorship over their stories (Das & Kleinman, 2000, p. 12). Conclusion: Research as Empowerment or a False Promise? At the heart of the changes observed in childrens talk about violence in the course of this research was the complex interplay of power and pleasure. The experience of talking and listening within a small group, facilitated by an adult who attempted to be

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non-judgemental, enabled children to gain a pleasurable sense of self-efficacy and social justice. In the sense that this created dissonance from more familiar modes of communication, it may have encouraged children to question and to challenge, possibly leading to increases in reflexive agency (McNay, 2000). But the persisting power differentials between adult and child, and between children, suggest that the perceived shifts in self-efficacy may have been somewhat illusory. And the changes, rather than creating the dissonance and discomfort generative of reflexive agency, seemed to generate instead comfort and composure, which made these alternative perspectives so pleasurable and enticing. This has some discomforting implications for myself as researcher. The everyday lives of children outside the research space were neither comfortable nor composed, and this raises questions about the ethics of research which offers false promises. Perhaps the research generated in children a sense of agency that was not matched to the everyday reality of childrens marginalisation. In the final meeting of the 13-year-old girls group, for example, they asked me whether I would convey their ideas to the Government, expressing both doubts and hopes that their voices will be listened to outside the research space:
Stacey: Shandre: Fatima: Stacey: Ramona: Are you going to report this to them because they wont listen because were only children. Ja, but we also got rights. They never listen to us. To children [] You must maar [just] give this all to the President.

Despite their scepticism about the prospects of being listened to, this could be interpreted as generating unrealisable imaginings of their own agency. Might the research offer only illusions of agency, in the end reinforcing childrens awareness of their own marginalisation and leading inevitably to disappointment? This may have been the case in another South African study, which used participatory approaches to involve children actively in documenting and improving their urban environments, and found that, although children talked afterwards about having a greater awareness of their environment and ability to express views, there were no gains in measures of self-efficacy, self-esteem or internal locus of control following the intervention (Griesel, SwartKruger & Chawla, 2002). Indeed, there was a slightly lower degree of self-efficacy at the end of the research, possibly reflecting childrens frustration that their perspectives about problems and solutions did not make a real difference to their neighbourhoods. Awareness of a childs own social position may be more likely to generate dissatisfaction and frustration than agency and change. Attempting to anticipate transformative possibilities is crucial in the ethical conduct of research in order to reduce the potential for harm. As well as potentially producing disappointment, there is a possibility that increasing the perception of reflexive agency might lead a child to challenge existing social relations in ways that increase risks to their safety. For example, questioning taken-for-granted systems of punishment, or even raising for discussion topics previously held private or sacred, might be seen as a threat to existing social relationships, and lead to further punishment (Stanko & Lee, 2003).

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And yet, while there is a danger of false promises, or of potential harm, there may be spaces for research to meld into intervention in ways that could create possibilities for change, albeit within the constraints of the social setting. The kinds of discussions with children described in this article could feed into a schools behaviour plan or personalsocial curriculum; their ideas about addressing violence in the neighbourhood could contribute to neighbourhood discussions on community policing. For such projects to succeed, research needs to attend to the everyday social relationships of children, and to entail careful analysis of the complex dynamics of power. The goal is not to give voice to children, which after all could merely strengthen beliefs in rather than contest violent practices. It is about opening up dialogue and debate, acknowledging the power of the researcher and also the awareness that, in constructing research which increases the reflexive agency of participants, the researcher loses some control over the consequences. At the same time, striving towards a more equitable, reciprocal relationship permits the researcher, no longer feigning impartiality, to confront and challenge participants, as Bronwyn Davies (2003) did in a study with young children, which aimed to transform gender norms through challenging children to re-name, re-write and re-position themselves in relation to these norms. In conclusion, a reflexive research relationship entails constant reflection on the positions of the researcher and of the participants, within the layers of social relationships in which they are embedded, and of the possibilities for and constraints upon change within these relationships. If, as the opening paragraph of this article suggested, there is an imperative in the research for transformation, then this analysis suggests that researchers may need to find ways both to illuminate and to challenge perspectives. This will entail developing the research relationship over a period of time and moving beyond the safety of the formal research space to childrens everyday social networks. In these ways, the changes generated within the research may be more likely to extend to the more significant and durable relationships of childrens lives. Transcription Notation
[] text omitted.

[gangsters] translation of Afrikaans word which has entered local non-standard variety of English. short pause.

Acknowledgements For their valuable and perceptive comments on drafts of this article, I would like to thank Marjorie Smith, Peter Aggleton, Claudia Lapping, Alison Clark and Ian Warwick. I am also grateful to Ingrid Lunt, Elaine Unterhalter and the Children and Violence Programme, a project of the Trauma Centre for the Survivors of Violence and Torture, for their support throughout the study, and to the Economic and Social Research Council for providing a fellowship to support the writing of the article.

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