Abstract
CQ Researcher is a weekly American policy report that aims to translate complex policy issues for a largely student readership. This first edition of 13 collected reports brings together a loose constellation of consciously controversial issues in relation to the experience of children and young people.
CQ Researcher is authored by journalists, and the purposes of the reports are journalistic in nature. They serve to highlight a range of challenging issues that include the enlistment of child soldiers, the trafficking of children and young people, the impact of domestic violence on children and young people, and patterns in juvenile crime.
The book is divided into four sections: global issues, violence and bullying, child and adolescent rights, and social issues. While these serve to cluster what is otherwise a diverse set of issues, the book as a collection has no master narrative. Instead, each individual report promotes discussion, facilitates further research, and encourages student readers to formulate their own positions in relation to a series of key questions. The opening section of each report is in fact written as a response to these questions.
Given the journalistic nature of this collection, the issues are presented emotively, but the content of each report is skewed towards a factual analysis. Each report presents an account of the issue, a chronological summary of key legislation and international initiatives in relation to it, annotated bibliographies, a list of relevant agencies and peak bodies, and a rich collection of news excerpts, photographs, charts, graphs and maps. Each report also features a debate between experts in the field that examines two competing sides of a key policy or social debate related to the issue. These include such debates as whether more aid is the most effective means of addressing child poverty, whether juvenile offenders should receive life sentences, and whether credit card companies market their products too aggressively to young people.
This is not a sociological text, and makes no pretence in this direction. If there is an underlying uniting narrative, it is a concern for young people and their rights in the context of tangible, often physical risk, but the book does not attempt to grapple with risk as a discourse. Instead, it provides an accessible and engaging omnibus of legal and social issues that affect the lives of young people. It is an extensive text that meets its brief to provide a primer on the issues facing children and young people.