Usual guidelines for ethical conduct in research with human participants require procedures for obtaining informed consent from research participants. Studies involving children normally require that active consent be obtained from parents, who sign and return a consent form, specifically stating that they give permission for their child to participate. If the consent form is not returned for any reason, the researcher is unable to include the child in the study. It is not unusual with active consent procedures that parents lose the form, forget, or for other reasons do not return the consent form, even though they may have no objection to their child's participation. In such circumstances children are denied the right to decide for themselves whether or not they wish to participate.
An alternative procedure is passive consent. Passive consent requires only parents
who do not give their permission for their child to participate to sign and return the
consent form. Parents who do not return the form are deemed to have given consent. Passive consent was viewed as an appropriate approach for studying children' s perceptions o f violence because, in line with Article 1 2 o f UNCROC, this procedure gave children's rights to speak priority over parental rights to privacy.
While human ethics committees tend to require active consent from care givers before children are eligible to participate, there is a growing international acceptance of the importance of allowing children to describe their views of what has happened to them (e.g., Hallett & Prout, 2003 ; United Nations, 1 989; Hamby & Finkelhor, 2004). This is further brought into focus with the increasing realisation of how children have not had the opportunity to describe abuse experiences in previous studies. Active consent in this type of survey research can also lead to biases on significant
other words, while ethnic minorities, disadvantaged and at-risk subgroups are more likely to be eliminated from studies requiring active consent; passive consent
procedures result in a more representative sample (Anderman, Cheadle, Curry, & Diehr, 1 995).
Due to the similar nature of this study gaining access to children could have been problematic. Normally Ethics Committees insist that the active consent of the children's care giver must also be obtained before the children are approached for their consent. Massey University's Ethics Committee also requires that children must be able to give their own consent if they are of an age to understand the nature of the project. It is generally recommended that this apply from around seven years of age. In New Zealand the Privacy Act gives both parents and adults control over their own information. In other words, the Privacy Act limits permission about the provision of information to the individual and there is no obligation under the act itself to obtain parental permission. However because schools are expected to work in partnership with parents it is more usual for parental permission to be sought in all matters relating to their children.
Peart, Foley, and Henaghan (2003) explain the two main contentious issues in research involving children as: ( 1 ) consent of the child or a proxy to the child's
participation; and (2) risk of harm to the child. They state "the legal validity of consent depends on the competence of research participants to understand fully the nature of their involvement and on the absence of any improper influence or pressure in the consent process" (p. 27 1). Research involving children therefore can be problematic because of the imbalance of power between adults and children, however a landmark legal case challenged the previously held views regarding children's competence to be involved in decision making about matters that concern them. The U.K. House of Lords
ruled in the 1 985 so-called Gillick versus West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health
Authority case that children under 1 6 years of age who are able to demonstrate
sufficient understanding and competence to make wise choices can give valid consent
on their own behalf (Peart & Holdaway, 1 998; Peart et aI., 2003 ; Rutherford, 1 999,
p. 687, cited in Lyle, 200 1 ).
Nesbitt (2000) poses the question, does researching children's perspectives call
for different methods of data gathering and interpretation? In other words, whether and
to what extent do children differ from adults as research participants? Smith and Taylor (2000) consider that critics of research involving the perspectives of children raise the
maturity to articulate their own perspectives. Mason and Falloon suggest that age categorisations within childhood reflect an adult-centric hierarchical ordering of knowledge. They refer to the term "ruling relations" as defined by Smith ( 1 999, p. 77,
cited in Mason & Falloon, 200 1), which, in the case of children, is taken to mean adults
and their construction of adulthood, as the possession of maturity and reality. As adults
become the gatekeepers' of children's knowledge (Carroll-Lind, Chapman, Gregory, &
Maxwell, 2006) the age issue is examined in the children's rights discourse.
While legal opinions a few years ago would have favoured parents over children, this is no longer the case. A study conducted in Italy (Baldry, 2003) used very similar methodological procedures to the present study. Other New Zealand research has been done in this way; clearly this is not the first. Precedents regarding the juxtaposition of parents' and children's rights have been set at other New Zealand universities where these same issues were confronted and worked through (e.g., Children' s Issues Centre
at Otago University regarding Counsel for the child study and Access arrangements for
children following parental separation). Similarly all procedures undertaken in the present study ensured that parental consent was informed and that parents understood their right to either give passive consent or active dissent. Parents were clearly given the choice of opting in or opting out of the project. This procedure has gained some
acceptance for practical reasons and also because of the agreement among nations about the importance of hearing the voice of the child (UNCROC, 1 989).
The choice of a passive consent procedure proved to be effective in obtaining a relatively high participation rate and enabled children the right to choose for themselves whether or not they wanted to participate. Seeking active consent from parents and care givers may have denied some children their right to choose to participate and could have concealed abuse.