Preventing suicide: the voice of children and young people

In 2014, 151 young people in Australia aged between 5 and 19 years died by suicide.  Many organisations and individuals are working hard to develop strategies that will make a difference, but the voices of young people are often missing from the conversation. In this series of Insights papers, yourtown/Kids Helpline shares the views and experiences of young people with lived experience of thinking about, planning and attempting suicide.  Using an online survey,  472 children, adolescents and young adults told us how they got help when they were feeling suicidal, who helped them, which experiences were helpful and which weren’t, and what advice they would like to give to other young people, families, friends, and those who provide services for young people like them. In each paper, we have intentionally privileged young people’s own words, as they provide important learnings about how young people think and feel, and are more powerful than anything we could write. Insights Parts 1 to 3 present young people’s experiences of seeking and receiving help, and their advice to others. Insights Part 4 summarises and highlights the issues that young people told us are important to them and draws attention to  those issues that we believe warrant increased consideration in the current policy and practice arena. A fifth paper describes the background and method of the consultation

Have you talked with a teacher yet?’: How helpline counsellors support young callers being bullied at school

When seeking help and support about being bullied, children and young people weigh up the benefits and risks of talking to their friends, parents, teachers and counsellors about their experiences. The focus of this article is calls to an Australian helpline for children and young people where the strategy of 'talking to the teacher' is discussed by callers and counsellors as a possible way of dealing with the caller's bullying situation at school. Transcribed and analysed data extracts of calls show how the young callers' bullying experiences are being heard by the counsellor and also reveals the skill of the counsellors in managing these calls within the philosophy and guidelines of the service

Bullying: the moral and social orders at play

This special issue came about following an international symposium on bullying held in December 2008 at the Department of Child Studies, Linko¨ping University, Sweden, led by Jakob Cromdal and Paul Horton. The articles represent a diverse body of theoretical and empirical work that emphasises children and young people’s views of and participation in everyday experiences. The articles, as a collection, aim to be provocative in terms of challenging some existing dominant understandings about bullying to propose alternate ways to understand this phenomenon

The altruism of pre-adolescent children's perspectives on 'worry' and 'happiness' in Australia and England

This article presents the perspectives of Australian and English children on the broad terms worry, happy and change. Utilizing a qualitative methodology, the study engaged with pre-adolescent children (‘tweens’) on the issues affecting them in the modern world. Participants were drawn from a large regional secondary school in Eastern Australia and a comparable regional secondary school in England. Students completed an open-ended questionnaire. In both contexts, many of the children identified specific personal and predominantly social priorities. In their responses, the children tended towards features in their lives that reflected the high importance of individual relationships. The factors that give rise to the identified importance of the family relationship reveal their prioritization of the conditions in their lifeworld. The children demonstrated an acute and sophisticated knowledge of their local community and the global world.They identified local and global issues as they impacted on them personally