Abstract
Inspired by a central concept in the sociology of childhood – that of ‘place’ – this article explores how childhood is constructed and experienced in an atypical place for childhood to unfold. The place in question is a refuge for women and their children who have experienced violence in the intimate sphere. In this article, ‘place’ has a dual meaning as referring to both social positions and physical locations. Employing this dual concept to investigate an atypical place provides insight into the dynamics that shape childhood space. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with children, the analysis shows how children negotiate children’s places in challenging circumstances in a semi-public setting. It uncovers the plurality of children’s places and how these are shaped by the children’s positions in a protective context. The plurality of children’s places becomes apparent by paying attention to the temporality of these places, which foregrounds the relational qualities and fields of power that contribute to the shaping of childhood space.
Introduction
Within the sociology of childhood, it is noted that children are ‘peculiarly noticeable in relation to their setting’ because children either occupy designated places or are seen as ‘out of place’ (James et al., 1998: 37). The connection between children, childhood and the concept of place is both conspicuous and illuminating. As an analytical concept, ‘place’ can be a lens for understanding the way childhood is constructed and experienced, as it captures the web of power and ideals that shape childhood space (James et al., 1998; Olwig and Gulløv, 2003). In this article, I use ‘place’ to focus on an atypical setting for children and childhood, namely a refuge for women and their children who have experienced violence in the intimate sphere. A women’s refuge is a so-called ‘three-fold space’, in which arenas that are typically separated – home, institution and workplace – merge in a single location (Dorrer et al., 2010). As such, a refuge can be understood as a semi-public setting in which private lives unfold. By investigating an atypical place, we can gain insight into childhood space, as well as how children are emplaced by adults but also negotiate and challenge these places.
Much sociological research on children and place is built on the argument that places are socially constructed (see e.g. Hackett et al., 2015; Holloway and Valentine, 2000; James et al., 1998). This brings attention to issues of power and agency and illustrates the duality of place as referring to both social positions and physical locations (Olwig and Gulløv, 2003). As Olwig and Gulløv argue, there is an ‘uneven distribution of influence and status reflected in different conceptions and uses of places’ (Olwig and Gulløv, 2003: 8). This means that individuals – in this case, children and adults – negotiate the use and meaning of different settings and, through that process, negotiate what ‘proper’ places for children are. In relation to the refuge, it is exactly this dual meaning that reveals its atypical nature. A refuge is not a typical location for children and childhood. The children are there because of exceptional circumstances, namely violence, which can influence their social positions. Furthermore, the organisation of the refuge makes it atypical in itself because of its convergent nature collapsing arenas that are usually separate, which creates a living space in a material setting constructed by others and inhabited by strangers. This can influence children’s uses and ideas of the setting. By employing ‘place’ as an analytical framework, the purpose of the article is to explore how childhood is constructed at a refuge, and how children experience everyday life in this particular setting.
Children’s experiences of everyday life at refuges are remarkably absent from previous research (notable exceptions are Bowyer et al., 2015; Øverlien, 2011, 2012). This absence may be related to the way children have been seen – in research and policies – as ‘packages’ accompanying the mother to the refuge. Today, this has changed, and children have gained a stronger position and are recognised as service users in their own right (Øverlien, 2011: 71). However, this change has yet to come through in research, which still neglects children’s perspectives. Instead, the majority of research has explored women’s experiences of refuges or services (for reviews, see Abel, 2000; Robinson et al., 2020), focused on the effectiveness of services for children (Poole et al., 2008; Stephens et al., 2000), or surveyed children’s psychological or behavioural problems (Jarvis et al., 2005; Ware et al., 2001). The scarce body of research shows that children can experience the refuge stay as a ‘waiting room’ (Øverlien, 2012), during which they have to navigate a lack of knowledge of the refuge (Øverlien, 2011), and furthermore describe a lack agency to influence their everyday lives (Bowyer et al., 2015). However, this latter way of describing children’s experiences runs the risk of treating agency as an entity, which masks what children actually do in this setting. Thus, the article adds to this literature by employing a children’s perspective and focusing on children’s spatial practices to further our understanding of children’s experiences of staying at a refuge.
Women’s refuges in Denmark
A refuge offers temporary shelter for women and children who have experienced violence in the intimate sphere. At the time of the fieldwork in 2018, there were 50 refuges in Denmark with a capacity of 559 residents on a given day. A total of 2019 women and 1915 children stayed at a refuge in 2018 (out of a population of 5.8 million). Most Danish refuges are independent or run by NGOs, and the main cost of the stay is covered by the local municipality in which the woman has residence (National Board of Social Services, 2019). Danish refuges provide counselling in relation to the violence and support in contact with the social services. Some refuges (including the one in question) have childcare professionals who focus on children’s experiences and practical issues related to children.
At the refuge where the fieldwork took place, security measures (e.g. cameras and electronic locks) and rules made sure that the violent partner – and in this case the father or stepfather of the child – did not enter the refuge. Not only were the outer doors locked, but the doors leading into the different areas of the refuge (e.g. resident and staff areas) were also locked, making most of the children dependent on their mother to get around (children above the age of 12 years had their own key). In the resident areas, the families lived with approximately eight other families, sharing a kitchen, living room and playroom. The walls in the shared areas were made of glass making it possible to see who was in the rooms and what they were doing. All families had a small private room accommodating three people with beds, a desk and a chair as well as a private bathroom. In many ways, the material setting in the shared areas mirrored ideas of a home with a dining room table, sofas, toys and pictures on the walls. However, the word ‘home’ not only connotes ideas of a material nature but also ideas of a less tangible nature, such as social, emotional and moral ideas (Douglas, 1991; Giles, 2020; Gullestad, 2013). A home is often considered a private and intimate space, but at the refuge, the setting was shared with strangers including other families and staff members. Thus, upon moving to the refuge the children not only lost their familiar surroundings (family, friends and belongings), but also had to navigate an unfamiliar setting comprised of people they did not know.
Children’s places
The concept of ‘place’ is central in the sociology of childhood. James, Jenks and Prout suggest that children either occupy ‘designated spaces’, e.g. kindergartens and schools, or are seen as inappropriate or invasive in ‘adult territories’, e.g. bars or crossing busy streets. As an analytical concept, place – or, in this case, children’s place – has a dual meaning. It refers to children’s social positions within a generational order or society at large, as well as their physical locations, such as homes, streets and educational settings. These two meanings are closely linked, and the social positions children occupy influence their use of place (Olwig and Gulløv, 2003).
Four decades ago, an increased interest in children and childhood began to emerge, and children gained attention within personal, political and academic arenas, which made childhood a topic in itself (James et al., 1998). This development has been called the ‘individualisation’ of children (James et al., 1998), as children went from being seen as merely part of a family or the educational system to being recognised in legislation as members of society with individual rights (Näsman, 1994). It changed the focus from children’s needs to children’s rights and conceptualised children as independent actors rather than individuals dependent on adults (Meyer, 2007; Wyness et al., 2004).
Throughout Western societies, adults have created ‘proper’ places for children to keep children safe and impart social value to them (James et al., 1998; Olwig and Gulløv, 2003). This has led to an increasing institutionalisation of childhood because children spend much of their everyday lives in settings created for them by adults (Näsman, 1994). Therefore, several studies within the sociology of childhood have investigated children’s experiences of such places (see e.g. Christensen and O’Brien, 2003; Hackett et al., 2015; Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Rasmussen, 2004). Children’s experiences of these settings are bound up with issues of power and control (James et al., 1998). To capture this, some scholars differentiate between places for children and children’s places (Olwig and Gulløv, 2003; Rasmussen, 2004). ‘Places for children’ are largely under adult control. Olwig and Gulløv argue that these places are: ‘defined by adult moral values about a cherished past and a desirable future, clothed in commonsense notions about children’s best interests’ (Olwig and Gulløv, 2003: 3). Thus, they are imbued with moral and idealised notions about childhood as a time of innocence and peace (James et al., 1998; Olwig and Gulløv, 2003). The other type of places – ‘children’s places’ – are created by children. In his seminal article on children’s places, Rasmussen describes these places as locations that children attach special meaning to, e.g. a favourite climbing tree, and engage with physically and emotionally. This means that children not only relate to official places designated for them by adults but also relate to informal places that are sometimes unnoticeable to adults (Rasmussen, 2004).
Previous sociological research on children and place has often investigated readily apparent and designated places for children, such as schools, recreational centres and playgrounds, to explore how children experience and appropriate these places (Olwig and Gulløv, 2003), focusing on issues of identity and spatial attachments (see e.g. Langager and Spencer-Cavaliere, 2015; Rönnlund, 2015). Other research has focused on children ‘outside’ these designated places, such as in urban areas and public spaces, arguing that they constitute important sites for children’s explorations of themselves, their relationships and social positions (see e.g. Christensen and O’Brien, 2003; Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2013). Underlying these studies is an interest in issues of power and how different ‘control components’ in various settings enable or restrict children as social actors (James et al., 1998: 39). Recently, this aspect has been made more explicit through the inclusion of the concept of ‘spatial agency’ in sociological research. This branch of research investigates children’s agency in the context of the intergenerational relationships that constitute children’s everyday lives and the spatial factors that can influence children’s agency (e.g. the purpose of locations, the flow of actors through these locations and the affordances offered by various locations) (Hackett et al., 2015; Seymour, 2015). This article contributes to this latter tradition by exploring a semi-public setting that blurs the boundaries between private and public spaces through which different forms of power and their influence on childhood space become transparent.
Methods
The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork at a refuge in Denmark in 2018. After an initial meeting with the childcare professionals at the refuge, I was given permission to carry out the fieldwork by the management. Afterwards, I explained the study at a staff meeting and obtained the consent of the staff. Prior to the fieldwork, all families received information on the study, and the consent of the mothers and children was obtained as well as negotiated throughout the fieldwork (Ericsson and Boyd, 2017). A total of 31 children participated in the study. Sixteen children were younger than 6 years of age. In addition, 26 mothers and 25 staff members (full-time and part-time) participated. At the end of the fieldwork, the families had stayed at the refuge between 2 and 22 months (mean = 8.5 months). All names in this article are pseudonyms.
Over the course of eight months, I participated in the families’ everyday lives. I spent more than 450 hours at the refuge and I was present three to four days a week (both weekdays and weekends). I participated in family practices (e.g. dinnertime) and the children’s practices (e.g. play). Ethnography is useful in the study of childhood because it allows children a more direct form of participation than other methods do (e.g. surveys) (Prout and James, 1997). This approach allowed the children to become familiar with me and opt in and out of the research in their own time (James, 2007; Prout and James, 1997). From the beginning, the children showed an interest in me and quickly began to include me in their activities. To gain a position and build rapport with the children and mothers, I spent most of my time in the living areas and less time with the staff. This allowed me to achieve the role of a ‘non-official adult’ (Mayall, 2008: 113) – someone who had a lot of time on her hands and could engage in lengthy conversations and play. Furthermore, by embedding myself in the place in question, it became possible to gain insight into different positions and the use of the setting. During the fieldwork I wrote field notes in a notebook – often when I was alone, but sometimes I brought the notebook with me to remind the families of the ongoing study as they became more familiar with my presence. The notes focused on the physical setting, use of space, activities, interactions and conversations (DeWalt and DeWalt, 2002). I did not write any names or identifiable information in the notebooks. After each day I wrote expanded notes in Word.
Through informal conversations with mothers and staff members, I gained insight into how children were described, talked about and conceptualised at the refuge. Furthermore, I reviewed the formal documents that families received upon arrival to understand how children were described at an institutional level. By participating in the children’s everyday lives, I experienced how their positions were constructed through everyday practices, institutional rules, and their access to and presence in various areas. Participant observation was essential in gaining knowledge of the children’s spatial practices. Because children’s places often are non-verbalised and unnoticeable to adults (Rasmussen, 2004), discovering these places sometimes required that the children invited me in. Here, one word turned out to be a magic word that opened up these places. The word ‘come’ accompanied by a waving hand or a child quickly heading in a particular direction allowed me to enter these places. However, children’s places also became visible via my tagging along and observing the children’s bodily engagement with the physical setting. In addition, I conducted semi-structured interviews with ten of the children (between the ages of 6 and 12 years) during their time at the refuge, and eight out of the ten children participated in a follow-up interview 6 to 12 months later. All 15 children above the age of six were invited to participate and ten of them agreed. The interviews were structured around two overall themes each supported by a visual exercise. One theme was the children’s everyday lives explored through a map of the refuge (another theme was the children’s family and other relationships explored through concentric circles).
In the first step of the analysis, all field notes and interviews were organised thematically. This initial organisation revealed various tensions related to the refuge as a place, such as the themes: ‘home – institution’, ‘institutional time – family time’ and ‘public places – private places’. These tensions inspired an analytical focus on place to explore children’s experiences of living at a refuge. Then, all empirical material was read again and organised using the following themes: ‘perspectives on children and childhood’, ‘children’s place’, ‘place for children’, ‘adult place’ and ‘institutional place’. This illuminated various fields of power within which children and adults negotiated social positions and the use of the refuge. This will be explored in the analysis below.
Children and childhood at a women’s refuge
Wrong place – Childhood under threat
The places children spend their everyday lives reveal much about how children and childhood are constructed and conceptualised within society (James et al., 1998; Olwig and Gulløv, 2003). This was also apparent at the refuge. Here, many of my conversations with adults – mothers and staff members – revolved around what kind of place a refuge constituted for a child. These conversations where imbued with concerns about what a ‘good’ childhood is. In this section, I explore how these concerns imparted on the children’s social positions before turning to how this influenced the children’s use of space in the next sections.
A question the mothers often asked me was ‘What do you think it’s like for a child to live here?’ This question contains an underlying concern about children at refuges. This concern was raised early on during the fieldwork, when two mothers, Mona and Alice, showed me around. Here, Mona told me that she had been thinking about her children before moving to the refuge because she was worried about what kind of women they would meet, especially whether they would have problems in addition to violence, such as alcohol or drug misuse. This worry stems from the idea that children should be shielded from such experiences. The concern also extended to the refuge itself. Several mothers were unsure of how to describe the refuge to their children. One of them was Najat. Shortly after she and her son had moved in, the following situation played out: Najat asks me, ‘How old is the refuge [in Danish called a “crisis centre”]?’ Amir [8-year-old son] says, ‘Refuge? Refuge?’ Najat shakes her head and replies in Arabic. I explain how old the refuge is, and Amir looks at me and asks, ‘Is it a refuge?’ Najat says, ‘No’ and pauses before changing the subject, ‘Our room – you like our new room, right?’
Najat did not engage in a conversation with Amir about the refuge. Instead, she ignored his questions, leaving him with a lack of knowledge about the place. Several of the other mothers also placed their children (especially younger children) in an unknowledgeable position – not by refraining from talking about the refuge but by calling it something else. One of them was Nina, who said, ‘We call it the hotel’. Other mothers used comparisons to other forms of communal living, such as a ‘commune’. These narratives seek to normalise the refuge stay by comparing it to other types of living arrangements. It indicates an anxiety among the mothers about bringing a child to a refuge – an anxiety that implies that this is not a ‘proper’ place for a child.
Turning to the staff, there was a common perception of the refuge as a place that children should not be. When I walked around a quiet and empty refuge, staff members would praise the families for finding ‘meaningful activities’ to do outside the refuge, while concern was voiced for the children who, for various reasons, had to stay on the premises. As one staff member, Karen, said about one of the families: ‘What are you supposed to do here? What a shame she [mother] can’t take the children somewhere else.’ The childcare professional, Helen, expressed a similar view of the refuge as a place that does not support a ‘proper’ children’s life. When I talked to her one afternoon, she mentioned a teenage girl she was working with. ‘I help her get a normal youth’, Helen said and continued to talk about the children more generally. ‘The children living here are ordinary children in an extraordinary situation. They need to get out. They shouldn’t be here. They need to get out and be part of ordinary life.’ From Helen’s perspective, a ‘normal’ children’s life was not possible at the refuge, and therefore, the children had to find ‘normal’ things to do elsewhere. These narratives place children and childhood outside the refuge and suggest that a ‘proper’ childhood is not possible in this place. Furthermore, on an institutional level, children were constructed as ‘children in need’. This was illustrated in the formal leaflet that families received upon arrival. Here, it was stated what mothers should do to help their children. The leaflet was written with the mothers as recipients, and included directions for how they could support their children in headlines such as ‘Advice on how to support your child while staying at the refuge’ or ‘What can you [mother] do?’ Thus, the focus was on children’s needs and how adults could help them, which places children in a passive position awaiting that adults do something for them. This contrasts with the position the mothers were placed in, which was linked to a prevailing contemporary approach within social work of self-dependence and empowerment (see e.g. Helmersson and Jönson, 2015).
In conversations with mothers and staff members, concerns were raised about children and childhood at the refuge which constructed children as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966: 36). When something is out of place it implies the presence of an order that has been contravened. What that order is can be understood in relation to the discourse on ‘childhood innocence’ (Meyer, 2007). According to this discourse, there are experiences that children should not be exposed to, and experiencing violence and moving to a refuge are constructed as two such experiences. This understanding can entail a protective view of children, as adults have to help them to preserve their innocence (Meyer, 2007; Wyness et al., 2004). Closely tied to this idea is the concept of ignorance, which entails the assumption that a child is innocent if the child does not know what adults do not want the child to know (Kitzinger, 1997: 169). This was illustrated in the way some mothers placed their children in an unknowledgeable position – a position that was disputed by the staff, who advocated openness. When children are left unknowledgeable about the refuge, it prevents them from being active participants in the family’s situation and their own life worlds. It places them in a passive position in which the mother is the ‘trustee’ of the child’s best interests (Wyness et al., 2004: 84). This can prevent children from gaining knowledge that is necessary for them in order to understand and express their own emotions and make informed decisions about their lives (Kitzinger, 1997). In this way, the protective power that adults assert over children can render children powerless.
Fleeting place – Negotiating children’s places
Children’s potentials as social actors are closely linked to physical settings and children’s positions (Olwig and Gulløv, 2003). The position children were placed in at the refuge – as children in need of adult protection – was the position from which they negotiated the setting. In this section, I show how children created and negotiated various children’s places, and how these places both were subject to and challenged adults’ power and control.
At the refuge, the children created various places. Some places were created alone, while others were shared with other people. An example of a children’s place was one that 3-year-old Theo had created: Two mothers, Ellen and Alice, are talking outside. Meanwhile, Ellen’s son Theo is running around on a mini scooter. He stops in front of me and asks, ‘Do you want to see the basement clown?’ I say yes, and Theo replies, ‘Come’. We run around the corner – out of sight of Ellen and Alice. Theo signals that we have to tiptoe over to the stairs that lead down to the basement. He says, ‘Take a rock and throw it down’. I ask if it is dangerous, and Theo smiles and says, ‘No’. I find a small rock and throw it down the stairs. As the rock hits the ground, Theo and I run away. We both laugh.
Theo had attributed special meaning to this place, which was ‘alive’ in his world (Rasmussen, 2004: 158). It was unnoticeable to others who had not been invited into his special place – they would simply see a flight of stairs. It was the meaning that Theo attributed to this place that brought it into existence (Rasmussen, 2004). Theo’s place had the bodily and sensory qualities that characterise children’s places – it engaged Theo physically by involving specific practices like tiptoeing and stone throwing, and also evoked specific emotions of danger and excitement.
A key dimension of the places the children created were their temporality. By tagging along, it became apparent that children’s places were often fleeting and temporary. At times, children’s places came into conflict with institutional practices – e.g. practices and rules related to the refuge as a workplace or a shared living space, as illustrated in the following: Thomas has started building a model railway in the playroom. After a while, the railway has become an intricate network. After two hours, Thomas has to eat dinner, but he returns afterwards. When I leave a little after seven o’clock, Thomas is still working on the railway. The next day, I meet Thomas and some of the mothers in the kitchen. After talking for a little while, Thomas says, ‘I want to build a railway.’ This surprises me, and I ask, ‘Didn’t you build one yesterday?’ ‘Yeah, but someone tidied up the playroom,’ he says and leaves. After he has left, one of the mothers says, ‘It was actually me. The cleaning staff doesn’t like when the playroom is messy. Then, they can’t clean.’
Thomas created a place of his own. However, his children’s place was short lived as it had to give way to institutional practices, restoring it to an ‘institutional space’. At other times, children had turned the dining room table, the sofas or the floor in the hallway into children’s places of drawing, bouncing castles or playing den construction. These places were similarly subject to institutional and adult control when they had to give way for families who had to cook, watch TV or have peace and quiet. In these situations, the children were often asked to go to the playroom – their designated place at the refuge. When this happened, it would often break up their activities because they were not resumed in the playroom.
The children were under close supervision by adults throughout much of their everyday lives. To ensure the safety of children and facilitate communal living, mothers were instructed to watch their child at all times, and rules regulated when and where children could play. The children did not passively accept this regulation but created spaces that challenged this control, as the following illustrates: It is Saturday morning, and I am sitting in the hallway with three children – Ronja, Miley and Theo. We are trying to inflate a blue mattress with sporadic help from Susan [Ronja’s mother]. Susan leaves, and we look at the flat mattress. Then, Ronja looks at me and says, ‘There’s a window. It’s been smashed.’ She stands up and says, ‘Come.’ She leads me down the hallway. Theo and Miley follow us, and Elias comes out from the kitchen and runs after us. All of us look out the window. In the neighbouring house, a window has been smashed. The hole is round, and Miley says, ‘Looks like a football smashed the window.’ I say, ‘Yes, it does.’ ‘And there’s Noah’s pacifier,’ says Ronja and points to the ground underneath the window.
A few days later, I learned from one of the children that they knew who had smashed the window and that it did involve a football. There were several episodes during the fieldwork in which children threw things (e.g. toys) out the windows, even though it was prohibited. The children often knew who had done it, but importantly, they rarely told an adult. Another typical example was a situation in which Ellen had told Theo that he could not stand on the coffee table. When she left the room, Theo jumped up on the table and looked at me before jumping to the sofa. Then he sat down, looked at me and smiled. Other children would stand on the dining room table or hit a hanging lamp when their mothers looked away or left the room. In this way, they took control of the space – in short fleeting moments.
The children’s use of the setting shows that the refuge, in essence, was an ‘adult territory’, making the children’s possibilities for control highly limited. This was even the case with the children’s designated place – the playroom – which remained largely under adult control or functioned as a place children were sent to if they were too noisy or in the way of other practices. This supports the strong argument on the part of childhood studies that issues of power are central to childhood space (James et al., 1998). At the refuge, the different forms of power became noticeable in the temporality of children’s places. Some places had the potential to last longer than others, especially places created on the margins of the institution, but most children’s places were fleeting and temporary. However, even though the refuge was largely under adult control, the children found ways of taking control over the space. This happened through brief moments of ‘naughtiness’, when they resisted adults’ power and control.
Contradictory place – The institutional home
Places are not just physical locations. They also have a symbolic dimension (Gieryn, 2000). A classic example is a ‘home’ – or as Douglas rightly puts it, the idea of a home (Douglas, 1991). Focusing on the symbolic dimension can provide insight into the meanings that people attach to certain locations or how a place might contradict these notions. In this section, I explore the particularities of the refuge and how these influenced children’s experiences of the refuge.
In everyday life, the children rarely called the refuge ‘home’. Instead, they often referred to its temporary nature and said that this was where they lived for now. In an interview shortly after she had moved out, 11-year-old Maria reflected on her stay, and made a clear distinction between a home and the refuge:
What is the best thing about moving out?
To live in a proper place again because that other place [the refuge] wasn’t proper in that way.
How was it wrong?
Well, because it was a kind of place . . . Like an emergency. It was like if you had fallen and cut your head open and you had to go to the hospital – it’s not a home either, even if you have to stay there for a couple of years or a couple of days.
For Maria, the refuge was not a ‘proper’ place. Instead, she compared it to a hospital and the opposite of her idea of home. Later, Maria touched upon a certain aspect of the refuge that can explain why it contradicted her idea of a home. One of her favourite places was the playroom, but only when none of the other children used it. Maria said, ‘When there were no children in there, I would go there, put music on and lie under a blanket and think or draw.’ In addition to the playroom, she spent a great deal of time in the families’ room, where she watched movies on her own. For Maria, it was important to have a place where she could be alone, and this was difficult in a place comprised of other families and staff members. Her use of the playroom and the families’ room illustrate how she drew spatial boundaries that enabled her to create her own space. In interviews, many children emphasised the importance of the families’ room. They described practices that they did in this room, such as drawing, watching YouTube videos, or playing on their PlayStation – sometimes with their mother or one of the other children but, at other times, alone. In the shared living room, there was a TV and a PlayStation, but most children preferred their own. Thus, these practices point to the importance of having a private space, where the children could engage in activities away from the eyes of the other families.
One of the most striking aspects of the children’s everyday lives was how much time they spend with or in the presence of other children, mothers and staff members. In the afternoon and evening, the doors to the families’ rooms were often open, with children moving in and out of the rooms, the kitchen, the living room and the playroom to do homework, shower, play and eat dinner. Being watched by many adult eyes, it was not uncommon that other mothers and staff members would correct children. For example, mothers would tell other children to hold their hands over their mouths when coughing, or not to sit on the table. At times, staff members would remind children to listen to their mother and remain in her presence. However, this was met with resistance from some children, as the following illustrates: Theo is in the playroom. One-year-old Noah is also in the playroom with his mother Laura. Noah crawls over to Theo. He tries to climb onto Theo, but he pushes him away. Laura sees it and says, ‘Theo, you can’t hit Noah. If you hit him again, you can’t play with him.’ Theo frowns and says, ‘You can’t tell me what to do. Only my mum can tell me what to do.’
Here, Theo made a distinction between Laura and his own mother, thus establishing a boundary between his and other families. In this way, he negotiated the shared nature of the place and created a space exclusively for his family. Theo was one of the children who most actively negotiated spatial boundaries. He created spaces, either physically or verbally, that included certain people, while others were excluded. Physically, he closed the door to different rooms to control who he played with. He also created distance verbally by telling other children or adults that they could not participate in an activity or that they did not have authority over him. Other children employed similar strategies to manage the shared setting. They would similarly close doors, say ‘no’ to playing or sharing food with other children or go to a different room if particular people came in. Thus, they employed different strategies to take control of the shared setting.
The children’s spatial negotiations can be seen as ways of navigating the semi-public nature of the refuge. Here, children’s domestic lives, which are usually practised ‘backstage’ in the private realm of the family, were brought ‘front stage’ in a semi-public setting (Goffman, 1990 [1959]; Wyness et al., 2004). The children’s practices indicate that it was not only important to have a private space – a ‘backstage region’, which is a place where it is possible to relax and act ‘out of character’ without an audience watching (Goffman, 1990 1959]) – but also having control over the space. In the shared areas, the children did not have control over who to spend time with. This is what makes the institutional home of the refuge distinct from traditional ideas of a home. A home is characterised by a distinction between an inside and an outside world (Douglas, 1991; Giles, 2020; Harden, 2000). However, at the refuge, this distinction disappeared, creating a space where children (and adults) constantly had to negotiate spatial boundaries to maintain the sense of privacy associated with ideas of a home.
Discussion
The analysis has explored how children experience and negotiate children’s places in challenging circumstances at a women’s refuge. It has shown how the children from a marginalised position as ‘children out of place’, carved out their own places of meaning in a highly adult-controlled setting. The findings add to the small body of research on children’s experiences of staying at a refuge, but also further our understanding of the central concept of ‘place’ in the sociology of childhood. I discuss these two contributions below.
First, previous research has argued that the increased focus on children’s rights in the last 30 years has influenced how children are understood at refuges in more recent years, providing them with a stronger position as service users in their own right (Eriksson, 2013; Øverlien, 2011). However, this analysis supports the conclusion made 10 years ago that a change had yet to come through in practice (Øverlien, 2011). This article indicates that children still occupy a passive position at refuges. The findings show that a refuge is predominantly an ‘adult territory’, where children’s access and practices are highly controlled by adults. This was illustrated by the protective position the children were placed in by mothers and staff members – a passive position, which meant that they had to negotiate children’s places from a marginalised position. This positioning created challenging conditions for children’s practices often making them secondary to other practices. Still, being placed in a passive position does not mean that children do not act. Previous research on children at refuges has presented a passive view of children, describing a sense of powerlessness and lack of agency to influence everyday life (Bowyer et al., 2015). However, treating agency as an entity that children either have or lack ignores what children actually do. Agency is a relational process that can meet different possibilities and limitations depending on the context (Spyrou et al., 2019). At the refuge, the children navigated and negotiated the setting and created meaningful places of their own on the margins of the institution and in moments between institutional practices. They negotiated spatial boundaries that provided a sense of privacy and created spaces for themselves and their family. In some situations, their practices challenged adults’ control over the space and showed their resistance to the way that adults constructed ‘proper’ places for children. These latter practices were sometimes individual (e.g. jumping on the sofa) but at other times collective (e.g. sharing secrets of misbehaviour). This indicates that the children at times united in shared practices through which they created their own ‘secret world’ and in that way took control of the setting. In this article, I have mostly focused on children’s spatial negotiations in relation to adults and thus child–adult relationships. However, the children’s collective practices could also inform us on how childhood is negotiated among the children themselves. These child–child relationships could be an interesting aspect for future research to explore.
Second, the analysis furthers our understanding of ‘place’ by bringing attention to the plurality of children’s places. In his article, Rasmussen foregrounded concrete and physical places to advance his argument of the interfaces and discontinuities of ‘places for children’ and ‘children’s places’ (Rasmussen, 2004). However, in this article it was not necessarily specific areas of the refuge that stood out as important but rather how these places came into existence. Thus, the transient nature of children’s places foregrounds the different forms of power embedded in various settings, and how children’s positions influence children’s places. The focus on physical settings in Rasmussen’s analysis emphasised the material qualities of places, such as ‘specialised places’ that children can have difficulties turning into children’s places (e.g. recreational centres with specific rooms for music or ball play) (Rasmussen, 2004: 170–171). However, this analysis highlights the relational qualities that influence how children’s places are created. When a materialistic approach is applied it runs the risk of essentialising children’s places, fixing them as concrete locations in space. However, this article suggests that children’s places are more fluid as they emerge and disappear in interaction between children and adults. Thus, locations are neither ‘places for children’ (e.g. a classroom) nor ‘children’s places’ (e.g. a climbing tree). Instead, places for children and children’s places should be understood as a continuum that includes the various degrees and forms of power that contribute to shaping childhood space. To this end, I argue for the inclusion of the temporal dimension in analyses of childhood space, since this can be a way to gain insight into the fields of power and the potentials and limitations of children’s agency that exist in specific settings.
Conclusion
Children and childhood are situated in places that are socially, politically and culturally constructed (Hackett et al., 2015; James et al., 1998). This makes ‘place’ a complex reality but also a lens through which childhood can be explored. This has been the lens through which this article has investigated how childhood is experienced and practised in the semi-public setting of a refuge. The concept of place revealed the plurality of places in which children were to be found. These places were conceptual and physical as well as structured and emerging. Paying attention to the variety of children’s places and how they are constructed can enhance our understanding of childhood space. Children are emplaced by adults, but children also challenge the places created for them and negotiate ‘proper’ places of their own. Children and adults negotiate these places from different positions, employing various forms of power and drawing on different experiences and ideas of children, childhood and place. This creates different conditions for childhood. Protective discourses of children can create especially challenging spaces for childhood. The protective power that adults assert over children can turn into suppressive power that reinforces adults’ control over childhood space, leaving children few possibilities to explore and negotiate their own social positions and places of meaning.
Footnotes
Funding
The research was funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark grant number DFF-7024-00040.
