Children's and parents' perspectives on risks and safety in three Belgrade neighbourhoods

Abstract

The article examines children's and parents' perspectives on risks and safety in the neighbourhood in the context of Serbian society undergoing turbulent transformation. The evidence for the analysis comes from a small-scale survey with parents and 13–14-year-old schoolchildren and eight group interviews with the children in three Belgrade urban settings. The data show that the main difference between children's and parents' perspective is situated along the axis general risks in broader society vs. particular knowledge of risks and coping strategies embedded in the neighbourhoods. Such difference is related to different social positions of adults and children but is also significantly marked by specific social context. Bearing in mind recent brutalisation of Serbian society, risk anxiety in general is lower than might be expected. Due to weak institutions parents still rely considerably on social safety nets within the neighbourhoods. Their practices are generally more instructive than restrictive, thus implicitly supporting the practices through which children exercise significant agency in using places. Different spatial characteristics of the studied neighbourhoods emerged as an important contextual variable in both children's and parents' perspective on risks. The under-urbanised suburban locations are perceived as more risky, contrary to experience in the West.

Keywords:

• risks
• risk anxiety
• children's perspective
• parents' perspective
• urban neighbourhoods
• Serbian society

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Professor Rosalind Edwards from London South Bank University, UK for her valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper and to anonymous referees for their useful suggestions that helped us improve the paper.

Notes

An indicator of criminalisation of everyday life is a constant increase in crime rate of adults in Serbia from 2000. The crime rate of minors was decreasing between 2000 and 2004, but it is in constant increase since (webrzs.stat.gov.rs/axd/dokumenti). Evident is an increase of types of violence, such as family violence, peer violence, street violence of football fans, etc., which directly involve and affect children. Unfortunately, there is no crime statistics available on level of municipalities and neighbourhood that would add to the local context of our study.

According to UN Convention on Rights of the Child (CRC) the term ‘children’ is used to indicate persons under the age of 18. Nevertheless, different cultures attribute the term ‘young people’ to persons who have passed a certain point in transition before the age of 18. Similarly to many Western countries, in Serbia the ‘rite de passage’ is transition to secondary school. Therefore, our respondents who attend higher forms of primary school are here referred to as ‘children’.

Since population in the neighbourhoods in Belgrade is very ethnically homogenous, ethnicity of children and their parents is not a relevant issue.

The number of parents is smaller since not all the parents of the children attended PTA meetings. For that reason we did not analyze parents and children in pairs.

In spite of overrepresentation of professionals, the sample structure allows the analysis of the social status variable as the number of children with their parents' status in different categories is sufficiently high. Nevertheless, considering the social status as independent variable there was no significant variation either in children's or in parents' perspectives.

Adds up more than 100% since respondents could choose more than one response.

Usually those fights are prevented by teachers or school security, but sometimes they take place with rather serious injuries to children.

While only in 36% cases in the children's responses.

While in 65% cases in the children's responses, in this case being in congruence with the parents'.

School security involves: teachers, security guards (engaged by school authorities and paid by the parents) and the school policeman (a newly established state policy of securing the schools in need). The latter two measures are consequences of the recent lack of institutionalised protective mechanisms as well as a response to an increase in crime rates in general and peer violence in particular.

And by that it resembles ‘close-knit rural communities’ with ‘the protective gaze’ as described in Northern Ireland (Meguire and Shirlow 2004, p. 80).