Ethical Considerations When Researching Serious Violations of Children’s Rights in the Global South: An Overview of the Challenges

This paper examines the ethical challenges to undertaking research on violations faced by children in the Global South. It does so by discussing how four disciplinary frameworks have responded to ethical concerns, and also left certain issues unresolved. The disciplinary frameworks are first, the development of standard research ethics from Nuremburg to the Belmont Report; second, the intervention of children’s human rights, as primarily expressed in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which appears in the early 1990s; third, the discipline of Childhood Studies, addresses the importance of children’s agency, and fourth is the critical approach in the movement to decolonize research. Through these frameworks, issues such as the protection versus participation debate, the rights of the child to participate, the benefits of understanding sensitive issues from the child’s viewpoint, and the challenge of ensuring research itself benefiting researchers and communities in the Global South. Currently, ethical reviews based on the Institutional Review Board (IRB), while extremely important, need to consider the importance of children’s participation and the utility of situational ethical responses to challenges in the field.