Social Representations of Children and Parents in Parliamentary-Committee Debates about the Inclusion of Child Psychological Maltreatment in the Quebec Youth Protection Act

Nathalie Plante and Lilian Negura
Additional contact information
Nathalie Plante: School of Social Work, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada
Lilian Negura: School of Social Work, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada

Societies, 2021, vol. 11, issue 3, 1-21

Abstract: Child psychological maltreatment (CPM) was incorporated into the Quebec Youth Protection Act (YPA) in 2006. At that time, various civil-society actors were invited to present to Parliament their views on these legislative changes. The objective of this article is to document the social representations mobilized by the stakeholders in the parliamentary committee in relation to the inclusion of CPM in the Quebec YPA. After explaining our research objectives, questions, and methodology, we will discuss our results, in particular about the distinctive nature of children as a representational object. This specificity will be analyzed in order to better understand the type of communication it generates and the corresponding hegemonic representation of parents. Specifically, implications related to the representational dynamics identified are discussed in relation to our collective capacity (or incapacity) to debate sensitive issues such as child abuse.

Keywords: child psychological maltreatment; social representations; sacralized social representations; parliamentary commission; youth protection; Youth Protection Act (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/11/3/114/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/11/3/114/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsoctx:v:11:y:2021:i:3:p:114-:d:638766

Access Statistics for this article

Societies is currently edited by Ms. Farrah Sun

More articles in Societies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().