Contextualising children’s relational agency and responses to privacy abuses

A relational understanding of agency recognizes children as agents who are able to make sense of the intricate and changing nature of relations and achieve contextually meaningful responses. This paper aims to explore how children employ their relational agency to reflect on parental intrusions into their privacy. Focusing on intrafamilial contexts of children’s everyday lives, it addresses the ways in which the notions of relational agency and individual privacy interlink children’s constructing personal boundaries in their family relationships. The empirical ground of this study builds on ethnographic research with children aged 10-14 and their families residing in urban and rural neighborhoods in Eskişehir, Türkiye. The data draws on qualitative interviews and ethnographic revisits collected through an extended participant observational fieldwork. In the light of the findings, I argue that children discern violations against their privacy and exercise resistance in diverse fashions and to varying extents depending on their situational evaluations of intergenerational power relations.