Disruption, Disclosure, and testimonial injustice: listening with England’s ‘ghost children’

Abstract (English)

For many young people in the UK, particularly those living in precarity, support promises often go unfulfilled, and the only opportunities for telling bear the burden of proving adversity in particular ways, if those opportunities occur at all. ‘Disruptive behaviours’, stomping through plate-glass puddles, shattering windows, defacing drawings when no one listens, these acts can be seen and felt to be action at the very least, which is engaged in some way, a form of message-making and message receiving. These sometimes serve as counterpoint to a Britain which has for more than a decade pursued increasingly invasive and complex mechanisms of disclosure for being seen and supported by a diminishing welfare state.

Formal disclosures, set “expectations of telling [which] challenge people to reflect on how they will be presented in public [..] space over which they have no control” (Manderson et al 2015:S185) can can sometimes be restorative, but can also break the teller in the process. Choosing to break things in ways that leave behind a visceral residue on witnesses of the rupture can preferable to accepting passivity when language is either unavailable or un-listened to.  

In this paper Robinson charts the ways that invisible mandates of self-disclosure are increasingly required in order to be seen by institutions and the ways that vulnerable people including children and young people in the UK can be erased as a result. Robinson proposes youth-led citizen social science as a possible remedy.