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ABSTRACT
Institutionalised youths who are digitally disconnected while long-standing in detention centres (in Portugal, these are called educational centres) face constraints to their digital rights. Given that most youths already come from deprived contexts, their present and future lives are deeply challenged. This article explores data collected in the participatory project DiCi-Educa, based on institutionalised youths’ digital media production and critical thinking, regarding issues such as digital citizenship, participation, and otherness. Using a participatory action research (PAR) methodology, they were stimulated to widen their views of the world and reflect on their digital rights and acts of participation using digital media. Institutionalised youths’ understandings before the project were centred on the use of social media, video games, illegal downloads, and hacking. Thus, during the project, they were challenged to debate participatory acts using the internet and digital media as tools for social change. The results point to these tools as relevant opportunities to the disconnected settings of the ECs. We recommend the need to tackle critical methods for thinking the digital realm as a path to building critical skills with these youths. Widening their views of the world can stimulate their well-being and contribute to avoiding risky behaviours.
IMPACT SUMMARY
Prior State of Knowledge: Summarize what is known about the topic. The digital rights experiences of institutionalised youth in detention centres are an under-studied topic in media studies. In addition, there is a lack of research compiling participatory media production and reflection on the uses of the internet in these contexts.
Novel Contributions: Summarize the primary contributions the findings make to the field. This study revealed the need to (1) bring digital and technological opportunities to the disconnected youth in detention centres; (2) the need to ensure quality types of digital equipment and a stable broadband connection; at last, (3) it pointed to the necessity to widen youth views of the world and promote non-risky behaviours.
Practical Implications: Authors should explicitly state what the practical implications of their findings are, and whether those implications are primarily for practitioners, policymakers, or parents. Our findings primarily target youth and staff in detention centres and secondly policymakers. We suggest to develop (1) longitudinal research and training with institutionalised youth and (2) training for the detention centres staff.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the DGRSP, the EC staff, and in particular the DiCi-Educa youth participants. We also express our gratitude to the DiCi-Educa researchers and consultants (Daniel Catalão, Vanessa Ribeiro Rodrigues, Vera Duarte, Maria João Leote Carvalho and Nélio Brazão) and to the reviewers who contributed to a serious revision of the text.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. DiCi-Educa, a digital media production, media literacy, and digital rights-based project in Portugal, has the approval of the national Directorate-General of Reintegration and Prison Services (DGRSP), who became a partner in the project. For more detail, see Brites and Castro (Citation2021).
2. In Portugal, detention centres and custodial institutions for young offenders are known as ECs. In the ECs a group of professionals (such as psychologists, teachers, and social workers) work with the youngsters towards their social, emotional, psychological, and educational rehabilitation.
3. This study used a two-step approach in the literature review. First, we chose the most relevant studies in the field, based on the expertise of the authors, and made a comprehensive literature search from 2015–2020 (June) – the core years of deep mediatised society (Couldry & Hepp, Citation2017) – to focus on institutionalised youth concerning media community-based projects and delinquency or even media use. This comprehensive search covered top-ranking journals from media and communication studies, criminology, and sociology (e.g. The Journal of Children and Media; New Media & Society; Crime, Media and Culture; and Childhood) using Google Scholar, B-on, and the leading evidence-based London School of Economics blog Parenting for a Digital Future. The goal was to identify as many studies as possible in these fields. The search returned few results and a predominance of media studies. Thus, a new search was conducted with a larger timespan (starting in 2010). Both searches used literature-based English keywords to enlarge the results: “institutionalised youth”, “delinquency”, “young offenders”, “juvenile delinquents”, “juvenile delinquency”, “youths-at-risk”, “youth justice”, “media and delinquency”, “juvenile offenders and media”, “juvenile offenders and media projects”, “institutionalised and media projects”, and “youths-at-risk and media projects”. Publications focused on the scope of institutionalised youth in media community-based projects and delinquency, and on media use from an audience perspective were scarce.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Maria José Brites
Maria José Brites is an Associate Professor at Lusófona University and a member of the board of the Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture, and New Technologies. She coordinates the project Youth, News and Digital Citizenship - YouNDigital (PTDC/COM-OUT/0243/2021) and finished a PhD in Communication Sciences (2013) at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her research interests include Participatory methodologies, Youth, journalism and participation, Audience studies and News and civic literacy.
Teresa Sofia Castro
Teresa Sofia Castro is a PhD Research Assistant at Lusófona University, Cicant. She did a Post-doctorate at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, developing a longitudinal study with families about digital media socialisation and mediation processes (SFRH/BPD/116279/2016). She is the Co-Pi in the project YouNDigital: Youth, News and Digital Citizenship (PTDC/COM-OUT/0243/2021). She holds a European PhD (SFRH/BD/68288/2010) in Sciences of Education - Educational Technology (Universidade do Minho).