Abstract
In response to Alan Davies’ paper ‘The child’s discovery of social class,’ this article reflects on how contemporary sociology can build on his insights to explore young people's views on sexual violence. Drawing on doctoral research with young people from Northeast England on sexual violence prevention, this article calls for validating children and young people's distinct knowledge and language, which can complement terms commonly used in policy and research. It presents young people's agency as relational and temporal, exercised individually and collectively amid constraints. It advocates for embracing uncertainty and reflecting critically on whose knowledge and voices are represented in sociological research. Building on Davies’ pioneering work, this article proposes alternative approaches to listening and engaging with young people that recognise their perspectives as vital in co-developing solutions to sexual violence and promoting social change.
Introduction
Davies (1965) paper ‘The child’s discovery of social class,’ was pioneering in its examination of the literature that elicited children's thoughts on class and power. It is especially significant because social class and economic issues are typically considered adult domains. His work suggests that children have their own distinct knowledge systems and sense-making processes that differ from those of adults. Their experiences and social interactions shape their understanding of class.
Ahead of its time, Davies’ paper was published before the near-universal ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989 and the development of childhood studies and sociology of childhood in the 1990s (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989). Childhood studies and sociology of childhood challenge the idea that children follow a fixed developmental path and instead recognise children as social actors in their own lives (James & Prout, 2005). The UNCRC established children's rights to survival, development, protection, and participation (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child , 1989). Both the UNCRC and the development of childhood studies marked a substantial shift towards recognising children's agency, departing from prior constructions of childhood, which framed them as passive and future adults. These developments value children's contributions and perspectives in the present, aligning with Davies’ early recognition of children's distinct knowledge systems.
My paper revisits Davies’ text 60 years on, a period marked by the increasing recognition of children's participation in issues that affect them, and their role in co-developing solutions (Warrington et al., 2024). In my response to his text, I reflect on how contemporary sociology, integrated with theoretical perspectives on childism, intersectionality, and decoloniality, can build on Davies’ insights to explore the young people's views on sexual violence. Drawing from research in the Philippines and the United Kingdom, I explore how children and young people's knowledge systems can offer transformative and hopeful possibilities for sociological inquiry. I draw inspiration from Davies’ work to explore new questions and opportunities in our current times.
Background: My research on sexual violence against children
While Davies examined children's views on class and inequality, my research focuses on sexual violence. In my doctoral research, I worked with two groups of 26 young people aged 13–18 from Northeast England to explore their views on sexual violence and its prevention.
In this paper, I use the term ‘young people’ to refer to those who participated in my study, reflecting their expressed preference to be referred to using this term rather than ‘children.’ Still, I refer to children and young people broadly to represent the population defined in the UNCRC. This landmark international treaty outlines the rights of children to protection, participation, survival, and development. It defines a child as anyone under the age of 18. My paper also acknowledges the need to validate the views of younger pre-adolescent children, who may not be as involved in research as adolescents due to differing opinions on their maturity and capacity.
Through a series of 18 iterative workshops using a participatory trauma-informed approach, the young people identified the issues that mattered most to them, such as understanding sexual violence, shame, and outcomes of sexual violence. These priorities emerged through a collaborative participatory process that positioned them as co-creators of knowledge. Methodologically, my study contributes to participatory and trauma-informed approaches that support children and young people in reframing dominant definitions and articulating their own understanding using their preferred terms. Anchored on core principles of shared decision-making, relationship-building, and co-learning, this participatory approach prioritised their emotional well-being and meaningful participation in ways that felt comfortable to them. It promoted their sense of choice and control in the research process.
My prior advocacy and research work in the Philippines shaped my interest and commitment to addressing sexual violence. When I was still working at a charity for disadvantaged children in the Philippines, I remember feeling moved by my conversations with girls who had experienced sexual abuse. It struck me most that many expressed hopes for their future rather than focusing on their past. These interactions influenced my approach to understanding and addressing sexual violence. I realised the significance of opening spaces where children and young people felt heard and valued in sharing their views. I committed to validating their experiences while focusing on their strengths and aspirations. These experiences underscore the significance of a young people-centred approach in research and practice.
Just like Davies’ inquiry into social class, in my doctoral research, I questioned the assumption that adults and children share a universal understanding of sexual violence. Similarly, I observed that children and childhoods are notably absent from discourses on sexual violence. Children are often objects of inquiry and protection from sexual violence in these discussions. Still, there are only a few studies that explore what they think about sexual violence in their own words without pre-determined framings. This reflective paper builds on Davies’ work by foregrounding children and young people's voices in contexts of harm such as sexual violence and challenging adult-centric assumptions in sociological knowledge.
Situating my reflections in theoretical plurality and positionality
My reflections are informed by a pluralistic and interdisciplinary framework that draws from childhood studies, intersectionality, and decoloniality. Critical childhood studies and childism, which emerged from the sociology of childhood and childhood studies critique adult knowledge systems and promote young people's perspectives in reconstructing norms and understanding social issues (Wall, 2022). These theoretical lenses challenge adultism, the privileging of adult perspectives and the exclusion of young people from knowledge-making (Cody et al., 2024; Wall, 2025).
Through my research and interactions with children in the United Kingdom and the Philippines, I have observed that young people are active contributors rather than passive recipients of adult knowledge. Building on Wall's (2025) critique of adultism, I argue that adult-centric knowledge systems associate the validity of knowledge with age and biological maturity, especially in sex education. These systems may result in testimonial injustice when children and young people's views are articulated in the language of adults and deemed less reliable (Fricker, 2007). My research challenges this view by positioning children and young people as collaborators and co-constructors in producing knowledge about sexual violence. I use the concept of adultism not to dismiss all adult-produced knowledge. Instead, I critique the structures that render young people's insights inferior, especially in discourses on sexual violence shaped by legal actors. These frameworks often fail to reflect the complexity of young people's experiences and can also be limiting for adults when responding to them.
My research extends Davies’ work by applying childism to contemporary issues of harm, specifically sexual violence. My reflections foreground young people's relational and affective knowledge. This knowledge emerges from collaborative sense-making and their lived experiences.
Davies’ work hinted at class differences but did not explore how these intersect with other identities. The theory of intersectionality highlights how overlapping identities, such as age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability, affect young people's experiences of sexual violence (Crenshaw, 1991). My work shows that these intersections shape their sense-making around sexual violence.
As a Filipino researcher working in the United Kingdom, I bring a decolonial lens to my work. Decoloniality as a lens pushes sociologists to question whose voices are centred in sociological knowledge and challenge the dominance of Eurocentric and Western knowledge systems (Peruzzo, 2022). Much of the literature, including Davies’, reflects Global North experiences and epistemologies. While my empirical research with children involves young people from the Global North in the United Kingdom, I continually question the concept of a ‘global’ childhood, referring to the Western view of childhood as a time of play, innocence, and learning (Wells, 2015). In the Philippines, for example, children and young people's agency is often negotiated within cultural norms of adult authority and obedience (Calamba & Rabe, forthcoming). Thus, I remain sensitive to the power dynamics between adults and children in research interactions and continually reflect on intercultural and intergenerational differences. I also embedded Filipino values of care, empathy, and relationality into my engagement with British young people as a core component of my participatory approach.
My recent research involves developing a sociology of childhood in the Philippines, distinct from the sociology of youth and highlighting the lesser-heard views of Southeast Asian children in the United Kingdom who are often less represented compared to South Asian children (Rabe & Pineda, 2025; Calamba & Rabe, forthcoming). These initiatives call for more attention to the voices of children whose experiences are influenced by diverse cultural contexts and migration precarity. Working across British and Filipino contexts has taught me that sexual violence is socially and politically constructed. Despite cultural differences, I observed similar themes of silence, stigma, and the impact of gender norms and adult attitudes on children.
Valuing children and young people's distinct knowledge systems
Davies’ work reminds us that children have unique knowledge systems. These could be influenced by adult-initiated frameworks, yet they negotiate them using their own terms. He observed that children could articulate different definitions of terms such as ‘the boss’ depending on their social interactions and developed as they linked their experiences with familiar concepts. In my research, I employed participatory sense-making strategies that enabled the young people to articulate their evolving understandings of sexual violence. It shows that their knowledge is not static but is constantly changing with their interactions with adults and other young people. Instead of imposing definitions, I invited them to share their baseline associations with sexual violence. My decision to delay our discussions on adult-initiated policy definitions until later workshops allowed the young people's conceptualisations to develop organically.
My findings show how legalistic framings shape young people's initial understanding of sexual violence. Their sense-making is shaped by perceived severity, physicality, and social consequences. For example, words such as aggression, cuts and bruises, crime, jail, and predators reflect associations with terms connected to justice and punishment. These associations suggest that their baseline understandings are shaped by formal education, policy discourse, and broader societal narratives.
To open space for further reflection, I introduced the concept of discomfort. This prompt enabled the young people to articulate broader experiences that fall below safeguarding thresholds but still cause emotional and physical unease. They used affective language such as weird, awkward, and rude to describe these experiences.
The young people also articulated a nuanced understanding of the impact of sexual violence. It includes explicit trauma and more subtle, everyday experiences of discomfort. Their descriptions of flinching and bodily tension pointed to involuntary, affective reactions to inappropriate behaviour. While some used biomedical trauma-informed language, meaning using clinical diagnoses of psychological distress, others described emotional and embodied responses to everyday behaviours that are often minimised. These insights challenge the assumption that harm must be clinically diagnosable to be valid. They foreground discomfort as a legitimate form of impact. It expands the current understanding of sexual violence through young people's affective vocabulary.
As sociologists, we are encouraged to critically examine the frameworks we use to engage with young people. In my research, I continually reflected on how I adapted to their ways of knowing without imposing my own ways of knowing through participatory sense-making and reflective validation of the themes we discussed. Just like Davies’ examination of children's views, this approach means not assuming a universal understanding of concepts such as harm or violence.
Listening to different languages as valid
Davies noted that children from higher-income households used terms such as ‘slum,’ while children from lower-income households referred to unemployment and illness. These linguistic differences reinforce that young people's vocabulary in communicating about concepts is grounded in their experiences and familiar reference points. In my research, the young people used emotion-based language to describe their experiences.
Their use of descriptors such as ‘discomfort’ and ‘disrespect’ reflects an affective and relational view of understanding impact and harm. Discomfort, for example, involved identifying and communicating personal discomfort about others’ behaviours. It indicates a feeling of something bothering or concerning the young person. Some young people defined sexual violence as disrespect for someone's feelings. Adopting these terms recognises the emotional and social dynamics of everyday interactions, shaping how young people articulate breaches of personal and emotional boundaries. In doing so, they articulated why certain behaviours felt harmful, drawing on personal experience and peer norms.
Young people's perspectives are notably absent in formal definitions of sexual violence. To address this, I facilitated a definition-focused activity after they had already explored behaviours, impacts, and contexts of sexual violence in earlier workshops. This scaffolded approach enabled them to engage critically with adult-initiated definitions and articulate their own. The young people's engagement with adult-initiated definitions of sexual violence reveals shared concepts such as manipulation and pressure. Meanwhile, their own definitions consistently emphasise lack of consent, discomfort, and disrespect. This suggests that they conceptualise sexual violence in ways that extend beyond legalistic or policy framings.
By exploring the young people's concepts and descriptive words related to sexual violence, my research builds on Davies's work, which highlighted children's diverse concepts and mental frameworks on class. My research shows how children and young people's language can expand how we communicate about topics such as sexual violence. Sociologists can further develop Davies’ work by exploring how children and young people's vocabularies can complement and expand the concepts and terms commonly used in research.
Exercising agency amid constraints
Agency has been a core concept in sociology, often positioned in discourse with structure (Esser, 2016). In my research, I have seen how young people's agency in navigating sexual violence is not binary and positioned clearly in the structure−agency debate (Nico & Caetano, 2021). Instead, it is relational and temporal.
Davies’ work demonstrates that children's class perceptions are shaped relationally, through family and friends. Similarly, my research found that children and young people navigate sexual violence amid complex relational considerations. Their decisions were influenced by relationships with peers, partners, and adults, as well as by anticipated emotional and social consequences. They reflected on the potential impact of their actions on their relationships and reputations.
The young people consistently demonstrated themselves as reflexive agents, building on Beckett's (2019) argument that they exert some degree of choice amid limited options and external constraints. They consider decisions as they gain knowledge and experience over time. They negotiate their choices amid structural constraints such as restrictive gender norms and limited options of staying silent or speaking out, mindful that both have implications for their physical and relational safety. Their insights reveal that their agency is influenced by relationships which affect their ability to articulate discomfort when necessary. My study shows how young people understand and navigate the complexities of speaking out about sexual violence, whether in peer relationships or with adults in positions of trust. They discussed the emotional and social barriers to disclosure, including shame and fear of adverse peer reactions.
My study builds on Davies’ work by showcasing young people's agency grounded in solidarity and empathy. They emphasised the need for collective resistance to shaming and victim-blaming, rather than placing the burden of self-defence on individuals. It was inspiring to see them co-develop messages of solidarity captured by the message ‘You are not alone,’ challenging stigma and shame associated with sexual violence.
These insights suggest that young people are more likely to discuss uncertain experiences and seek help when they feel supported. Supporting young people means reflecting on the roles of adults in co-developing safe spaces, so they can contribute meaningfully. In revisiting Davies’ work, my paper demonstrates how children and young people's agency must be understood through their lived realities, rather than being based on adult expectations.
Conclusion: Engaging young people by embracing uncertainty
The concept of safe uncertainty (Setty & Hunt, 2025) resonated deeply with me. It affirms that adult researchers such as myself do not need to have all the answers. Still, we must be open to holding space for complexity. My participatory approach embraced this ethos, allowing young people to reframe sexual violence on their own terms and with one another.
Uncertainty can become a site for transformation and critical reflection. It invites researchers to reflect on how knowledge is produced and whose voices are considered in sociological research. It promotes an active openness to evolving epistemologies that can be potentially transformative, conscious that power relations influence knowledge production (Egan, 2024). The theoretical perspectives of childism, intersectionality, and decoloniality call for an expanded view of knowledge, one that is affective and relational.
By valuing children and young people's distinct knowledge systems, we can promote intergenerational knowledge exchange and collaboration. This involves creating safe spaces where adults and young people learn from one another. In my research, I learned from the lived experiences and language of young people while they engaged with the knowledge I shared from research and practice. This approach fosters reciprocal learning that respects each other's expertise as valuable.
In practice, this might mean embedding young people's affective language in enriching adult-centric models on understanding sexual violence while also supporting them to make informed decisions when exercising agency in navigating experiences of sexual violence. Building on Davies’ pioneering work, my paper advocates for alternative approaches to listening and engaging with young people that recognise their perspectives as valuable in co-developing solutions to address sexual violence and promote social change.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
I thank the young people involved in this project for their invaluable insights, time, and efforts.
Funding
This research was made possible through the author's doctoral studentship funding provided by the Economic and Social Research Council−Northern Ireland and North-east Doctoral Training Partnership (Grant code ES/P000762/1).
Declaration of conflict of interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.