Being an individual and a sibling: Battles for privacy within sibling relationships in Turkey

Sibling relationships may involve an abundance of solidarity as well as conflicts. Children’s individual privacy, however, may be one of the most contested and conflicted themes for some sibships. In Turkey, the concept privacy is often associated with an Islamic culture that organises most aspects of the everyday life. Building on a larger corpus of privacy theories transcending the social and cultural constructions of privacy, this research aims to explore how siblings make sense of their own and each other’s individual privacy in their everyday interactions. Arguing privacy as a significant concept to childhood studies, it scrutinises over interactional and informational contacts among siblings. The empirical material is drawn from an ethnographic fieldwork conducted with 33 families in Eskisehir in Turkey. Initially, qualitative interviews that were carried out with the target children aged 10 to 14, their parents and siblings. This followed a series of revisits to the participant families. Findings suggested that most siblings aimed primarily at intruding in physical, intellectual and emotional spheres of one another. Some of their ways of violating their siblings’ individual privacy included attacking, showing over-affectionate behaviours (squeezing in lieu of hugging, biting etc.), getting into their personal belongings, undermining their artistic, academic or sportive achievements, making each other feel teased and embarrassed. The generational order and siblings’ gender were one of the key influences over their experience of individual privacy. The younger and the female children seemed to be less privileged and showed subtler resistance in terms of violations of their privacy.