From climate strikes to social media campaigns, young people have long played a role in political life. But RMIT experts say outdated assumptions continue to undermine their influence.
Professor Judith Bessant, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies:
"Young people are constantly encouraged to become involved politically, yet when they do, they're often told that politics is adult business and that they should stay in their place.
"Many young people are participating in a variety of political actions, which calls into question the deeply fictitious yet seductive and powerful story that young people lack political capacity and interest.
"As they have done since at least the late eighteenth century, huge numbers of children and young people are mobilising social movements oriented towards democratic renewal, social equality, intergenerational justice and planetary survival."
Professor Judith Bessant is a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) and a Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne. Australia. She writes on politics, youth studies, policy, sociology, media-technology studies and history, and advises governments and non- government organisations.
Professor Rob Watts, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies:
"So-called participatory youth parliaments, councils, roundtables and countless consultative initiatives are governance exercises designed and tightly managed by adults.
"They are therefore limited by adult interests, values and ways of seeing, and sustained by adult power and privilege.
"Children's and young people's political participation is integral to democracy, not merely preparation as future citizenship, but an expression of their political agency in the present.
"Acknowledging them as legitimate political actors requires seeing and challenging adult-centred prejudicial assumptions and institutional arrangements that constrain their capacity to be heard with effect, seen and taken seriously."
Professor Rob Watts teaches policy studies, politics, the history of ideas, and applied human rights at RMIT University. He is a founding member of the Greens Party in Victoria, a founding editor of the journal Just Policy (1994-2006) and established the Australian Centre for Human Rights Education at RMIT University in 2008.
