Seen and Heard: Young people’s voices and freedom of expression
Nicky Parker introduces an important and ambitious project around children’s rights and voices.
Under the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, children have just as much right as adults to express themselves and to participate in all decisions that affect them. Like adults, they have the right to peaceful protest. Yet children are often perceived as having limited capacity to form or express valid opinions until the magic moment they turn eighteen.
Seen and Heard is an ambitious three-year European project that’s exploring if children’s books can help young readers understand their rights and express their opinions. It’s highly collaborative, across borders, sectors and generations. The international team comprises children’s literature scholars, human rights experts, activists, artists, writers, educators and, crucially, over 600 children and young people aged 10 to 14 of over 50 nationalities, many of them migrants and refugees. Between us, we’re doing research, human rights education, workshops and creative mentoring, as well as making a children’s book that pays exceptionally close attention to the children’s voices. Through these various outputs we’re experimenting with the full life cycle of a social movement co-created with young people in post-migrant societies.
Seen and Heard is led by Dr Giuliana Fenech of the University of Malta, Professor Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak of the University of Wrocław, and Dr Farriba Schulz of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, as well as me and Kasia Salejko at Amnesty Poland. In a heartening vote for children’s books and rights, when we submitted our joint funding application to the European Union it beat all other applications across Europe (even STEM subjects).
The project launched in September 2023. We use human rights education, which encourages critical thinking and curiosity, and we root our work in the core values of intergenerational care, compassion, respect, justice, safety, well-being and freedom of expression. These are not just tick box words, they sustain us throughout.
We began with surveys in schools, asking the children what they thought freedom of expression means in their lives. Then we ran literature workshops, with topics like ‘who is given the power to speak and act in stories?’, and ‘who is excluded?’. The multiplicity of languages across the cohort, the age range, and the limited time in workshops made it challenging to choose the same books, but we had some in common (such as Shaun Tan’s Cicada and A Child Like You by Na’ima B. Robert, illustrated by Nadine Kaadan), and some that were particular to each country. Amnesty’s Story Explorer – a child-friendly piece of origami – proved a really helpful tool, inviting children to explore questions like ‘Whose story is being told?’ and ‘Whose voices aren’t heard?’. It encouraged a playful, thoughtful approach and focused the booktalk on issues of inclusion, child rights and freedom of expression. The children responded enthusiastically – over and again they told us that they felt respected, that no one had ever asked them these questions before. They also expressed real distress about current affairs, especially wars, environmental damage, bullying and mental health.
We went back with a second survey to see if their understanding had changed: research is ongoing and an academic book will follow.
Next we invited the children to optional creative mentoring. Mentors included illustrator Chris Riddell, who ran online drawing workshops that highlighted the right to play and relax. Storyteller Sita Brahmachari visited four Maltese schools and encouraged the children to draw, write and sing their responses to her big-thinking prompt: Dare, Dream, Believe, Imagine. Film-maker Charlie Cauchi trained children to make films on issues they passionately care about.
We also commissioned Sita to write long-lasting and creative human rights classroom resources. An Introduction to children’s rights, Freedom of expression, Refugee and migrant rights, Solidarity, and Creative protest will be freely available to all from September 2025.
Sita and Chris are working on the children’s book, which is directly inspired by the young people’s words, drawings and films. It takes the form of an illustrated multi-lingual communal poem and will be launched at the children’s schools and Bologna Children’s Book Fair in 2026. We hope that all the children and young people who took part will recognise their truth in its pages. We’re profoundly grateful to Sita, Chris and Walker Books for bringing it to life, and we also hope that our deep listening process will prove a touchstone for others in this time of global child rights crisis.
Nicky Parker is a specialist in children’s literature and human rights. She is Lead Consultant on Seen and Heard, and, on behalf of Amnesty International, author of These Rights Are Your Rights and co-author of Know Your Rights and Claim Them.
Seen and Heard is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
