The emotional aspects of children’s social relations
ISSN: 2073 7629
115 © 2019 CRES Special Issue Volume 11, Number 1, April 2019 pp
Special Issue Volume 11, Number 1, April 2019 pp 115 – 134
www.um.edu.mt/ijee
Is there a place for children as emotional beings in child protection
policy and practice?
Gabrielle Drakea 1
, Michel Edenboroughb, Jan Falloonb, Tobia Fattorec, Rhea Feltonb,
Jan Masonb and Lise Mogensenb
aAustralian Catholic University, Australia
bWestern Sydney University, Australia
cMacquarie University, Australia
The emotional aspects of children’s social relations have generally been marginalised in
social science discourse. Children, who participated in the Australian segment of the
Children’s Understandings of Well-being (CUWB) project used various media to
‘voice’ the importance for their well-being of emotional relatedness with family,
friends, animals and places. In this paper we place our construction of children’s
discussion of emotional relatedness in the context of the ‘emotional turn’ in research
and briefly describe how the methodology for our project facilitated an understanding
of the importance of children’s emotions for their lives in the present. We then focus on
the significance for child protection policy and practice, of what children tell us about
feeling safe, as this relates to the importance of agency and relation