On the Ethics of Getting the Word Out: Rural Girls Reflect on Ownership in Participatory Visual Research in Rural South Africa

Abstract

Despite the growing body of literature dedicated to ethical and methodological issues related to youth engagement and youth participation in arts-based research, the ethics of ownership in relation to the production and sharing of visual artefacts remains an understudied area. This work is particularly critical in the context of war-affected youth, and youth addressing issues of gender-based violence in their lives. Drawing on the voices and perspectives of a group of girls and young women affected by sexual violence in rural South Africa, we explore their views on the idea of ownership of the visual productions (videos, photos, policy briefs) created in an arts-based research project. As we highlight in the article, ownership is a complex ethical issue, and one that cuts across a range of concerns including consent, rights and personal engagement.

Introduction

We are a team of researchers focusing on ethical approaches to using participatory arts-based methods with youth in a variety of conflict and post-conflict contexts. We are particularly interested in tools and approaches to studying ethics in ways where young people themselves are consulted with the idea that there may be even more at stake for these youth, either because of the situations in which they live, or the trauma they may have experienced or to which they have been exposed. It could be further argued that where issues of social justice are at stake, it is even more critical that we learn from these youth about how they see the issues. In this article, we look at an arts-based project, a seven-year study entitled Networks for Change and Well-Being: Girl-Led ‘From the Ground-Up’ Approaches to Addressing Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa. The study was part of the International Partnerships for Sustainable Societies funding programme and its support for deepening an understanding of the legacies of colonial violence in two countries. ¹ We focus on fieldwork with a group of the girls and young women in one of the sites in rural South Africa where we explore with them their perspectives on ownership as an ethical issue in participatory visual research. In this work, we have been interested in exploring their perspectives and reflections on how they regard ownership in relation to the distribution and circulation of cellphilms (cell phone + video), photos, collages and action briefs they produced. To do this we have engaged in what Mitchell et al. (2017), refer to as the ‘go ask’ approach. Building on the work of Gubrium and Harper (2013), Mitchell et al. (2017) coined this term to refer to a type of expert interview as a source of in-depth knowledge. For Gubrium and Harper this ‘go ask’ method approaches expertise through interviews with other researchers. For Mitchell et al. (2017), ‘go ask’ has been more about drawing on the expertise and experiences of community-based participants and as such the interviews inherently contest the idea of who is an ‘expert’. In this article, our ‘go ask’ interviews are with a group of girls and young women who are experts in relation to their experiences of producing and sharing the visual artefacts created in an arts-based project addressing sexual violence.

What’s Ownership Got to Do with It? Ownership in Youth-focused Arts-based Research

Current research has shown that participatory arts-based methods contribute unique potential benefits to youth participants, where they become active agents empowered in the co-creation of knowledge that should optimally provide opportunity, voice and agency (Akesson et al., 2014; Gubrium & Harper, 2013; Mitchell et al., 2017; Ngutuku & Okwany, 2017). Visual ethics is a key feature of this, as Cox et al. (2014) and Moletsane et al. (2021) highlight, with ownership of the artefacts produced, a critical area of research. As Warr et al. (2016) note, ownership in participatory visual research is multifaceted. It can refer to the actual artefacts though with digitizing practices this may be less significant at least in relation to photos, cellphilms and collages. They also refer to seeking permissions and input about exhibitions and the negotiation of storage, something that Burkholder and MacEntee (2016) discuss in relation to ensuring that young people know they can remove their cellphilm or digital story when they wish. The common practice in research, and indeed typically the practices endorsed by Research Ethics Boards (REBs), is that researchers own the data, determining how and what will be stored, where and for how long. While we are not arguing against the need for practices that ensure ‘least harm and most good’, we are advocating that we have an ethical responsibility to create spaces where young people’s creative productions are represented in genuine and respectful ways, in ways that make them feel proud of their work, and that ownership practices particularly related to dissemination, require thoughtful consideration.

Here, we expand on some of our previous work examining how participatory visual approaches pose complex ethical questions in relation to work with youth in conflict and post-conflict settings (Akesson et al., 2014; D’Amico et al., 2016). Previously, we have focused on four broad issues that represent challenges in using visual methods with children and youth affected by global adversity (D’Amico et al., 2016, pp. 539–540):

Informed consent (and assent): Researchers need to develop specific approaches that ensure children understand the benefit of participating voluntarily in research and that consent is informed and an ongoing process.

Truth, interpretation and representation: It acknowledges that the arts-based research process uncovers multiple truths whereby children and youth become co-constructors of knowledge, and its interpretations, with adult researchers.

Dangerous emotional terrain: It asks us to consider the implications of portraying and/or embodying experiences, for both the child-participant and those watching, which are both critical to ensure participant safety.

Aesthetics: It raises questions of what is ‘good research’ (and who decides this) when you are dealing with artistic representation.

To these four critical ethical issues, we add the issue of ownership of the visual productions created by participants in relation to dissemination. How can youth participants display their own work outside the formal structures of a project? Related to this, do they have reasonable access to their own productions especially if they are on digital platforms?

Clearly, issues regarding presentation and ownership are interlinked, as researchers and participants must determine who maintains ownership of the visual productions and how they are able to be propagated and presented and should be considered in relation to the participants’ privacy and agency in choosing with whom the visual productions are shared (Scarnato, 2019). Gubrium et al. (2014) make a point of emphasizing that researchers need to have an honest conversation regarding ownership and presentation with participants in advance of the data collection and production. This is in order to come to clear agreements before the research begins, as well as explaining ongoing consent whereby children and young people can change their minds. These topics become a part of informed consent (or assent for minors) which is critical to the research process and is the first step in establishing a research partnership. We recognize as well that some ownership and ‘who decides?’ questions become more complicated when using cellphilm and visual productions which may not always ensure confidentiality and/or anonymity. As Scarnato (2019) states, ‘Such ethical challenges in using video methods are certainly not insurmountable but do require serious consideration and cautious navigation’ (p. 392).

As we consider issues of ownership and dissemination of the visual productions, we emphasize that representation of these can be influenced by contexts and audiences. There can be no guarantee that audiences interpret images in the same ways as participants—even when accompanied by narratives. In the context of the work that we report on below, we note that what to share and with whom, will vary depending on the relationship between the adult (e.g., parent, teacher, police officer, pastor) and the youth. The quandary remains on how to manage to respect the participating youth’s autonomy by ‘allowing’ them to ‘own’ the data and to take risks and acting on the responsible adult’s view of their best interest. It is also important to acknowledge that not all participants will want the same level of engagement. Gibbs et al. (2020) remind us that the adults in this process are responsible for adopting a ‘reflexive approach’ in using arts-based processes with youth to ‘ensure the research environment is supportive and creates opportunities for adolescence agency without compromising their social, emotional, or physical safety’ (p. 521).

We advocate that these elements be thought through when researchers assess the risks and benefits to children’s and young people’s participation to develop specific ethical protocols and safeguards when using arts-based methods to ensure that we ‘highlight these critical issues with the idea that we have a responsibility to do the least harm and most good as researchers’ (Akesson et al., 2014, p. 85). In conducting research with children and youth, the issues noted earlier support a rights-based approach where it is important to keep in mind that data about youth should engage them in the whole process (Berman & Albright, 2017). ‘A rights-based framing posits that adolescent’s participation in health-related research, services, and systems that affect them is a fundamental right’ (Gibbs et al., 2020, p. 15). In the context of our work, we do so because we believe that co-creating knowledge provides opportunities to develop personal agency and subsequently empower youths and, in this case, young women, to take action and decide on how to handle the health and well-being of issues affecting them (Gibbs et al., 2020). The ethical issues above ‘are not something to consider after designing research, but rather are an intrinsic and ongoing part of the design and implementation processes’ (D’Amico et al., 2016, p. 540). Mitchell (2011) affirms that researchers who use arts-based methodologies ‘take all possible precautions to ensure that no harm or the least harm befalls the participants and that their participation benefits them in the end’ (p. 31).

Getting the Word Out: Youth Accounts on Dissemination as Part of Visual Productions

In this section, we report on findings of how girls and young women engaging in participatory visual workshops on issues of gender-based violence contributed to understanding of ownership as applied to disseminating the data. We focus on the participation of girls and young women in rural communities (such as Paterson in Eastern Cape) in South Africa, particularly studying the use of participatory arts-based methodologies such as photovoice, collage, drawing and community mapping, digital storytelling and cellphilm production to address issues of sexual violence. Through project-initiated participatory visual workshops, girls and young women between the ages of 15 and 23 came together several times in each year of the project to explore the concerns, as they saw them. One critical feature of the work has been the idea of what is described as ‘from the ground up’ policymaking and the ways in which both the screening or exhibiting of images and follow up activities such as producing policy posters and action briefs have been used to reach communities and policymakers (see Mitchell et al., 2017, 2021; Yamile, 2021). At the same time, as has been highlighted in several of the publications coming out of the project (Moletsane, 2018; Moletsane & Mitchell, 2018), ethical concerns have been critical. This has been both in relation to the doing (how best to ensure ethical engagement in addressing sensitive issues?) and the learning (how does the project help to deepen an understanding of ethics in work with minors in relation to sexual violence?). Indeed, the project as a whole laid the foundation for Moletsane et al.’s (2021) book, Ethical Practice in Participatory Visual Research with Girls: Transnational Approaches. As acknowledged earlier, we regard the idea of ownership when it comes to dissemination as one that is particularly significant in arts-based research since the work inevitably leads to the production of many artefacts and artful creations. But what counts as ownership? How might we link ownership and the agency of participants in determining what happens to the productions created in arts-based research? How does technology (e.g., cell phones) create a new space for agency in that the participants actually have the productions on their own devices? And significantly, ownership also aligns with the idea of consent (or assent in the case of minors) itself, a concept that is particularly central to work related to sexual violence. ² In essence, we embarked then on a ‘go ask’ exercise where it is the girls and young women themselves who are consulted about what they see as central to issues of ownership and determining how the artefacts would be shared.

The context of girls’ ownership of visual productions related to gender-based violence in South Africa has particular significance in a country that has one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world with adolescent girls between the ages of 12 and 17 particularly at risk. As Moletsane et al. (2015) highlight, there is a consistent (and unrelenting) possibility of sexual violence that runs counter to girls’ safety and security in schools and communities, and to their reproductive health, particularly in the context of HIV and AIDS. Speaking of the dual burden of gender-based violence and HIV in adolescent girls and young women, Abdool Karim and Baxter (2016) argue that ‘young women aged 15–24 years, who have the least power in society, bear an enormous burden of both intimate partner violence (IPV) and HIV’ (p. 1151). They cite evidence that:

Young women between the ages of 15 and 24 years have up to six times more HIV infection than their male peers and are experiencing the highest death rates.

Compared with an HIV-negative woman, a woman who discloses her HIV-positive status to a partner of unknown HIV status is more likely to experience physical and emotional abuse (p. 1152).

While South Africa has made major strides in enrolling girls in primary education, one of the most pervasive reasons for the poor participation and low success of girls in the schooling system is gender inequality, and, in particular, its manifestations in violence against girls and women, and related health issues (most notably HIV infections and compromised reproductive health). In the case of rural South Africa, poverty, traditional leadership, geographic isolation, and legal and cultural frameworks intersect in the regulation of the lives of girls and women. Moletsane (2011) highlights the idea that ‘so-called cultural practices’, particularly in relation to performing sexualities, typically intersect in ways that place girls as the lowest of the low as far as having control over their bodies is concerned and this is further complicated by the high and gendered incidence of HIV and AIDS.

To explore issues of ownership, a focus group interview was conducted by Yamile (2021) with a group of six girls from a rural community in the province of Eastern Cape. The focus group was conducted in IsiXhosa and later translated into English. The girls, all between the ages of 15 and 17, had been meeting regularly for a little over a year as part of Networks for Change and Well-Being and in that work had produced several cellphilms, policy posters based on photovoice, action briefs and collages. As an experienced group deeply engaged in creating visual productions, they were in an appropriate position to consider the idea of ownership.

Taking Stock and Ownership in Dissemination

At a basic level, it was clear in the focus group that the girls had a strong sense of pride in relation to what they had produced. Indeed, something that the girls commented on was the sheer quantity of productions: ‘We as a group have produced nine cellphilms and have presented two cellphilms that we made to audiences. We have also produced nine policy posters and nine action briefs’. In talking about their productions, several went on to speak about a particular cellphilm they had produced called Rape is Real.

The reason why this cellphilm is my favourite is because I noticed that in my community people pretend or do not want to believe that rape is real. My other favourite piece is our Rape is Real action brief because as a group we managed to come up with solutions that we think might help in a rape incident.

Another favourite was a cellphilm called My Stuff My Privacy and the follow-up My Stuff My Privacy Action Brief. As one participant commented:

It shows how important each person’s space is, and also not to touch someone’s things without asking for their permission first. The cellphilm is showing that boys are playing with our sanitary pads when we secretly put them in our bags in the classroom and their actions embarrass us.

These quotes underscore the significance of these creations to their producers. As researchers we may find our own ‘favourites’ in a dataset or consider more how they fit with particular themes or what the impact could be on audiences, overlooking the personal value of the productions to the producers.

An ongoing issue of concern for REBs relates to who has access to the data and where it is stored. It is a question that in some ways dates back to the idea of a sole data archive for a project and a concern that fails to take into consideration the fact that young people are not only adept at saving the visual data on their own devices, but also the blurred lines between the art and data. As Mitchell et al. (2016) observe in their photovoice work with girls with disabilities in Vietnam, the girls often used their cell phones to capture what was going on with the project devices. While the research team provided a session on visual ethics, the girls may have taken it upon themselves to document the process and were able to circulate this material through Facebook or other social sites independent of the project cameras.

What the girls in Networks for Change and Well-Being told us is that they wanted to share the cellphilms and other data they had produced with family and community members. As one participant observed in relation to sharing with peers and teachers:

It is because they also live in this community, and I wanted to hear what they are thinking about the violence happening in the community. I also wanted to show my parents that young kids must be allowed to share their views about gender-based violence because anyone can be affected.

Throughout they spoke about feeling proud of their work and how various audience members had commented on their bravery in speaking publicly about the issues. When asked why they thought audience members were so positive, these girls observed:

I think it is because in schools, teachers do not talk about such issue like rape. Elderly people are saying a person is disrespectful when talking about rape or sex. Elderly people do not know that we want to hear from them what we should or shouldn’t do in life. This is just like my LO ‘Life Orientation’ teacher. She doesn’t go deep in sex topics, like she won’t say what will happen if a girl has sex with a boy. She only focuses on career choices to take after completing matric. In all, this project opened my eyes about sex.

They also commented on the responses of various audiences to the actual content of their productions:

I showed my cellphilm to my parents. My mother was so happy to know that I am now able to talk as I used to be a shy person. She also asked where I am getting the views, I am sharing to them about our work. I said, as I am growing up, I realized that if I don’t speak up people are going to take advantage of me. I also told my mother that I didn’t have a place to share my opinion and when the project was introduced it gave me chance to do so. In the project we have discussions and in discussions we are asked to share our views, and this developed me talking. Also, the project brought information about things we didn’t know how to solve and gave us chance to come with the solutions. I like the process because it gave us time to think about the solutions for our communities, solutions were not written for us. In the group we are also told not to be silent.

Similarly, another girl highlights the impact of her productions on her parents and especially draws attention to the significance of intergenerationality and the idea of knowledge flow. In this case, it is youth informing adults:

I showed a cellphilm to my parents. They said they are happy about the work we are doing because in their days they were never taught anything about rape. They also said they didn’t know the steps I introduced to them of what to do after being raped and ways that rape can be minimized.

This same girl goes on to report on the popularity of these cellphilms in their remote and small town of 5,000 people in Eastern Cape:

In addition, I would like to say that our cellphilms are trending in Paterson. We are trying to send them to everyone in the community.

This youth-to-adult transfer of knowledge is also reported in relation to a collage produced in one of the workshops:

I have the collage that I created in the workshop in Durban. The collage asked how does [Gender Based Violence] GBV look like in my community. I showed this collage to my family in the house and my neighbours. They congratulated me and said they would like to meet with the Professor that teaches us all these things they never thought I would be able to know at this age because when they were younger, they were never told anything about sex or rape.

Another girl comments on how she could also use her action brief and cellphilm with other youth in the community:

I have an action brief called My Stuff My Privacy and a cellphilm Rape is Real which I have on my cell phone. I showed it to my parents. They said I must continue working with the group. By staying in the group, I will be able to advise other children that are not allowed to share their views to speak out and break the violence silence.

Another girl commented about showing her action brief to a relative:

I have an action brief called ‘Don’t take girls for granted.’ I took it to my aunty living in Port Elizabeth. My aunt was in an abusive marriage and end up being divorced. My aunt said she is happy that I know these things at an early age because when she got married, she was told to be submissive and accept everything her husband is doing. I told her that we are working as a group, and we are doing this because we are concerned about our community. I also said, we as the group realized that nothing is being done in our community, so we are hoping to make change.

Finally, one of the girls talked about how these productions could go beyond families and the local community to even inform other social actors:

I have a cellphilm called Being Forced to Have Someone. I showed the cellphilm to my neighbour from prison because he used to tell us things that happen to people in the prison like being forced to have sex. He even asked me to send him the cellphilm and I did. He said he didn’t know that in the project that we go to we are taught about what to do after being raped. He encouraged me to share the cellphilm with my peers so that they have an idea of how it is to be forced to have sex with someone. He also said that is what is happening in prisons.

We have quoted extensively from the transcript of the focus group because of the relevance of what the girls and young women were saying in relation to how they were disseminating the artefacts (sometimes through their cellphilms but also written policy briefs and collages), and even more importantly, why. A typical post-production question in photovoice and cellphilm fieldwork is to ask the participants to reflect on who should see these films or photos. The idea that the participants could make this happen within their own networks is an important feature of knowledge mobilization.

The issue of ‘who decides?’ is of course an essential one. In this case, the participants provided insights about how they were reflecting on appropriate audiences. As one girl observed:

I would like the police officers to see these cellphilms, because they are the people, we report the cases to… We as a group should go to our community police station and present our work. I think the Police officer will see that we are serious about our work, and we want violence to stop in our community.

I would like the group to show the work to the clinic and police station staff. Reasons, in our cellphilms we show how a clinic, and a police station are supposed to work together. After a girl is being raped, she goes to the clinic to test and police station to report.

Their reasoning points out to what should happen—solidarity between communities and the police, and alignment between key stakeholders (policy and health care workers) but which rarely happens.

As Burkholder and MacEntee (2016) have noted, the shared storage site can become a site of negotiation and consent. Participants, for example, might change their minds about who should see their productions. Consent in relation to sharing data should be similar to consent in sexual relations. The participant should be able to change her mind.

The response to the question ‘Is there anyone you would not like to look at your artwork?’ drew mixed comments:

I would like everyone to see our work because gender-based violence doesn’t happen to young women and girls only. It happens to elderly women and elderly men as well. We want that to stop, that is why I would like everyone to see our work. I wouldn’t be scared to show our work to the President.

In addition, there was a mixed reaction to how religious leaders should be involved. And while one participant thought it was a good idea to show the priest their artefacts, other girls were more cautious:

I would like everyone to look at our work, but I think it will become tricky when maybe the priest from my church looks at it. I won’t be able to mention words like rape, sex at church. People will look at me like I am not a born-again Christian.

Interestingly, in relation to this question of screening the cellphilms, the group ended up going back to the point about how difficult it would be to mention words like sex or rape at church.

In our church it is always mentioned that a church is a holy place so people will think I am against the church law or disrespecting elderly.

Setting up this discussion about how participants feel about their art and the responses of audiences, and especially their reflections on who should see the art and why, proved to be revealing in relation to re-thinking ownership, from the perspective of the girls and how they were cognizant in considering the anticipated views of some community members, in this case, a priest. One key area is about individual or group processes. While individuals produced some of the work such as collages, this work has typically been done in a group setting. Nonetheless, the fact that one of the participants talked about sharing the collage she made at a workshop in Durban with her mother gives a good sense of the importance of actually having the material object in hand. This is also apparent in references to the cellphilms produced. Regardless of the device used to create these cellphilms (in some cases tablets), the girls were able to transfer these on to their own cell phones and in that way had ownership over screening them (to family, to the neighbour who had been in prison and so on). In this case, the availability and accessibility of technology was an important component of ownership and agency, a point that needs to be taken into consideration in relation to digital platforms.

Something else that seemed apparent was the girls’ ‘insistence’ that certain people should see their work. Far from being private or personal texts, their cellphilms, policy posters and action briefs were clearly meant to reach other people (e.g., the ward, police, clinics, local farmers). This idea of insistence is an area that may be missing in much of the attention to the ethics of ownership. The issue of who should not see the images, though, was also critical and should remind us once again of ‘who decides?’ and the importance of respecting the relationships they have in their own communities and that might not be known to the research team. In this case, the girls were concerned about the church and the priest, with some thinking the priest should just be exposed to this work, and others holding some reticence.

The issue of risk is of course a critical one when it comes to minors disseminating visual artefacts related to sexual and gender-based violence. What is important to note is that the work with the girls and young women at all of the sites attached to the larger project is not once-off and that a key feature of the approach is the idea of ‘girl groups’ (Girls Leading Change & Booker, 2019) facilitated or co-facilitated with community leaders, and characterized by ongoing reflexive engagement and the support of the research team. This ongoing reflexive process about ‘going public’ (p. 20) is highlighted by De Lange (2021), one of the lead researchers working with the participants. Central to her argument is that if we are to decolonize the research process, as researchers we need to be vigilant in our engagement with REBs and to ensure that Black girls in South Africa, those most affected in relation to gender and sexual violence, should not be silenced. This includes support for the girls and young women to do the background research for producing the ‘how to report rape’ cellphilm in the first place, for first screening it in the safety of the girl group, and for speaking at community events involving both the research team and the parents who were invited to a pre-screening event to review the cellphilms and to ensure that they consented to have the girls show the cellphilms publicly. The actual circulation of the cellphilms by the girls only took place after each of these steps were completed.

Discussion

As the data from the focus group suggests, ownership goes beyond producing and having access to the visual artefacts to determining how the visual artefacts can circulate in the community. As we stated at the beginning, ownership of material created in arts-based research is a relatively understudied area of ethics and we have been particularly interested in what young people themselves have to say about it, especially in relation to their own visual productions. In the accounts by the girls in section Taking Stock and Ownership in Dissemination, we see the strong sense of pride that these adolescent girls have in the work that they have produced, and how they (re)frame their understanding of what they have produced and its purposes, focusing on the issue(s) of ownership and the importance of their messages. Interestingly, they are not insisting on having their messages heard because they feel they themselves should be heard, but more that the messages about reporting gender violence need to be heard and by many different groups. This is a point worth considering in relation to previous work on voice in participatory visual research and especially in relation to decision-making.

This type of ‘taking ownership’ might be also read, as Taft (2010, 2017) notes, as a type of activism where girls and young women learn the ‘how to’ of producing the various genres key to sharing findings with other social actors as audiences. These approaches include policy posters (Mitchell et al., 2017) and declarations and girlfestos (Gonick et al., 2021). Much of the academic literature in our review on ethics in youth research was about research with youth or about adults sharing research on youth. However, it did not privilege the voices of the youth themselves, particularly in relation to reflecting on the process of engaging in the research. There have, however, been some exceptions. For example, in addressing the legacies of colonial violence, the Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia (YIWU) from Saskatoon, Canada, also part of Networks for Change and Well-Being, led the writing of a co-authored critical analysis for Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal on what it was like to share their work as Indigenous girls and about colonial settler violence at an academic conference (YIWU et al., 2021b).

This work on ownership in disseminating images aligns well with other work on participatory research with youth. For example, Kim (2016) undertook a review of projects using Participatory Action Research (PAR) involving youth. She underlines that ‘Youth participation is important because young people have a social right to participate in any decision-making processes that affect their lives’ (p. 39). But what does decision-making mean and on what decisions? Shier (2001) has adapted Hart’s (1992) ‘ladder of participation’ and created an alternative model to serve as a tool for practitioners to explore the different aspects of the participation process and to consider power sharing between the adults and youth researchers. In Shier’s model, there are five levels of participation: (a) children are listened to; (b) children are supported in expressing their views; (c) children’s views are taken into account; (d) children are involved in decision-making processes and (e) children share power and responsibility for decision-making (p. 11). Within each level, there are different stages of commitment to the process of empowerment: openings, opportunities and obligations. Shier (2001) is using these elements to refer to the role of adults who work with youth and the power relationships between adults and youth. But what happens if, for example, ‘involvement of decision-making’ and ‘sharing power and responsibility for decision-making’ are integral to a project?

Chen et al. (2007) underline, with reference to youth involvement in PAR projects on the issues they are concerned about, ‘that this question of ownership must also not then blame the youth if they don’t attain more control over the project’ (p. 145). As they observe,

[O]ne needs to be reflexive about the potential for being seen to implicitly value ‘higher’ levels of participation as inherently more ‘authentic’ or ‘empowering’ (i.e., participants must be free to choose less dramatic levels of involvement without being made to feel they are ‘not living up to their full potential’ or they are ‘letting the project down’). (p. 145)

At the same time, we would contend that ownership of the production as well as the process of arriving at the production, be it a report or action steps are also both important, and as the girls and young women in the study above emphasize, they can also be the ones producing the action briefs.

Kim (2016) notes that, in comparison to adults, the voices of young people as co-researchers have not been included, so ‘little is understood about the challenges and barriers to the active involvement of youth in PAR’ (Kim, 2016, p. 39). The narratives of the six girls in the case study give a sense of how critical it is for the participants themselves to be directing both the production and sharing of data in the community.

Ngutuku and Okwany (2017) wrote about the underpinnings of working with youth as co-researchers in a project that explored ‘the contextual realities and gendered social norms that structure youth sexual and reproductive health practices’ (p. 71). They believe working with young people as co-researchers ‘has the potential of giving them a voice in the most intimate matters of their lives. It also has the potential to destabilize adult/youth power structures in generation of knowledge’ (p. 73), but also within programmes that involve youth as participants. While they name and address several issues relating to power, they only provide a summary of comments by their youth co-researchers, rather than making the voice of youth evident in their article. This could partly be because they are asking adult co-researchers to reflect on their role in these partnerships. In our work, we have added to this literature in a succinct way. Finally, there is the question about what and who the research is for. Ngutuku and Okwany (2017) share the point that listening deeply to the trepidation and healthy scepticism expressed by youth researchers they worked with was shown in one comment: ‘It is good you have shown interest that we young people have a voice, but I will remain sceptical until I see the outcomes of the research being implemented. This is what I would call really listening to us’ (24-year-old out- of-school married female youth, Ethiopia) (p. 79). In essence, then, while engagement and ownership are both important, adult researchers must continue to play a critical role in supporting youth. While we acknowledge that from the perspective of REBs young people who are only 15–16 are minors and some of the youth studies to which we refer involved young people over the age of 18, the sophistication of the various sets of comments suggests a rethinking of the ethics of ownership particularly in the context of arts-based production and circulation of images.

Conclusions and Implications for Further Research

The accounts of the six girls in rural South Africa focusing on one aspect of ownership in participatory visual research, the dissemination of the productions, offer a rich sense of possibilities for what participant-led dissemination can look like. Although a small group of six, the fact that the girls had been working together for several years and as participants in numerous workshops in the project gives them, we would argue, a special expertise. At the same time, we recognize that the idea of ownership in participatory visual research is a complex issue and clearly there is more to explore particularly in relation to the broader community of stakeholders such as teachers and various policy actors. We see the need for expanding the focus on ownership to consider what ownership might mean in relation to the accountability of adults to ‘spread the word’. Local knowledge mobilization was a key feature of the work of the girls, but as noted earlier other concerns related to youth even having access to the data, and the significance of ongoing negotiation and regular reviews on consent (or assent in the case of minors) to use data remain. Protection, especially in relation to sexual violence, and ensuring that young people are not placed in situations of further risk are particularly critical. As the girls, however, pointed out, through the long-term activities of Networks for Change and Well-Being, they were already attuned to many of these concerns and explicitly commented on who should not see the images. Notwithstanding the emerging work on data sovereignty itself, we advocate for ‘on the ground’ discussion and reflection as central to the work of adults and youth working together in participatory visual projects. There are likely to be situational reasons for why something can be shared with one audience and not another, but if we are to respect the rights of young people, their voices are central to participating and owning these discussions. There is a need to explore and document these discussions as a critical component of participatory visual studies and as central to work in South Africa, in this case, on Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights.

We also want to return to the particularized contexts of various populations of young people. When is it safe to have in their possession artwork on contentious issues such as sexual violence? Is it even possible for young people to have personal items in their living space? Speaking, for example, of the temporary shelters where children of asylum seekers reside, the possibility of having any artworks in their possession might be impossible (McGill Art Hive Initiative, 2019). What responsibility then do researchers have to assure young people of the preservation of their artwork and how does this inform discussions of ownership?

A dramatic example of preservation and ownership is addressed by Andrea Walsh, a visual anthropologist (cited in Morrow, 2014) who documented the tragic and later celebratory account of a group of Indigenous youth from a residential school whose art teacher had kept the artwork that the students had produced more than 50 years earlier and which was eventually turned over to the University of Victoria. In what became a landmark moment of reconciliation, the artworks were eventually returned in a special ceremony to the artists now in their late sixties. As one of participants observed: ‘For me personally it was something from my past, something physical, that I had never had the chance to hold onto … We never took any of our personal belongings because they generally threw them away’ (para. 12, 14). At the end of his comment, however, he also expresses gratitude to his teacher for preserving the artwork (Morrow, 2014).

Finally, our literature review and field research suggest that it is important to deepen the understanding of ownership in relation to young people as co-producers of knowledge and as co-participants in knowledge, and in particular to develop tools and guidelines informed by young people’s perspectives, but also including considerations of researcher responsibility. Across the literature on youth-focused participatory visual methodologies, there are numerous practices that are now finding their way into REBs protocols. We cite several of them here. First, we have the example from Delgado (2015) who wrote ‘One recommendation is for adults to negotiate a renewable one-year agreement’ (p. 165), that would cover presentations and publishing. Then Burkholder and MacEntee (2016) as cited earlier have written extensively about youth participation in sharing ownership of online digital platforms, and especially the rights of young people to upload and remove material from a shared and dedicated archive. Another example is the recent work led by Indigenous girls and young women in the Networks for Change project in co-authoring with adult researchers. This work has drawn attention to the ongoing negotiation of consent and especially the rights of youth to determine who can view their productions and under what circumstances (Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia et al., 2021a; Young Indigenous Women’s Utopia et al., 2021b). Finally, we refer to an ongoing participatory visual project with youth between the ages of 13 and 17 from two conflict zones in Mali focusing on agency in education. In producing their cellphilms about agency, youth found creative ways to both comply with and own, in a sense, a ‘no faces’ approach within the ethical guidelines for the project, demonstrating their resistance to the conventions in humanitarian aid where, as Holland (2004) observes, the faces of youth are so often taken to be the faces of change. ³ These examples suggest the need for assembling a data bank of scenarios and successful innovative protocols that ensure the full participation of youth in participatory research. Returning to the voices of young people such as the girls of Paterson reminds us that there is a need for ongoing reviews of what ownership means. In this article, we have highlighted that young people’s voices can be represented in different ways, and through their very direct comments, we have shared their important reflections on issues of ownership which, might be read as ways to (re)frame new dimensions of ethical practice in research with youth. But beyond ownership, it would be remiss if we did not return to the ultimate purpose of this research which is to reduce sexual violence by talking publicly about the issues and from the perspectives of those most affected. This point should not be lost in our work with REBs.