Introduction

How do we safely research the role of social media and mobile phones in young people’s offending and/or delinquent behaviour? How do we ensure that in exploration of digital lived experiences both the young participants and the researcher are equally protected?

In assessing the implications of my digital ‘gang’ ethnography, this chapter will demonstrate the complexity of researching young people who are considered deviant both off- and online. As children are identified as a vulnerable population by nature of age, within research there are vast amounts of literature on how to conduct ethical research with them offline (Morrow and Richards, 1996; Farrell, 2005; Alderson and Morrow, 2020) and some about online studies (Zelezny-Green, 2016; Livingstone and Bloom-Ross, 2017; Standlee, 2017). Less attention is paid to research with populations of children deemed as sensitive due to child protection concerns and/or involvement in offending behaviour. Digital research regarding children within sensitive populations is largely absent. Ethical digital research with gangs has recently received some attention (Urbanik, et al, 2020), although there is little focus on how the age of participants affects research.

This chapter will demonstrate how principles of ‘do no harm’ (which guide research to ensure that no harm is done to the participants, researcher, and the research community) presented specific obstacles within my research. Concerns over the protection of participants as vulnerable minors and the perceived physical threat to me from children who carried knives dominated methodological choices, according to university ethical board approval. As a practitioner I had worked with young people involved in serious youth violence for over ten years. Despite this depth of front-line experience, strict limits were placed on the way in which young people could be involved in my research. As a result, I was placed in the difficult and powerless position of a covert researcher ‘lurking’ (Hine, 2000) online, without the young people’s knowledge or consent. The impact of emotional trauma on me as a researcher was not considered, which left me unprepared for witnessing traumatic images and videos of physical and sexual violence towards children that auto-played on social media feeds.