Postgraduate student campaigns for adultification awareness

Postgraduate student Sylvia Ikomi, alongside Oxfordshire County Council, has launched Adultification Aware, a campaign bringing light to the issue of adultification faced by so many.

Sylvia Ikomi, PhD student at the School of Education, and Oxfordshire County Council have been working together to bring attention to the issues presented by the adultification of Black girls, producing and distributing essential materials aimed at heightening awareness to organisations and individuals alike.

The term adultification refers to the phenomena wherein a child is perceived as older, more responsible, and less childlike than their true age. This impacts upon how these children are viewed and treated and is widely regarded as a form of dehumanisation. This issue disproportionately affects young Black girls, facing tropes which place them in a position which can be emotionally difficult and inappropriate for their age. Adultification is an issue across settings where power, bias, and discrimination are allowed to intersect including within schools, the care system, and the judicial system. Children who face adultification are more likely to be disciplined, stopped and searched, and are afforded less support and less protection from abuse than their peers.

We spoke with Sylvia to explore the process involved in establishing this essential campaign.

Can you tell us more about this campaign?

This project is a part of the research findings dissemination work that I was doing following my Churchill Fellowship study ‘The Adultification of Black Girls in State Care: Perspectives’. I travelled to the USA in August 2023 to complete the study. I spoke to a number of experts in the USA and Canada. The Churchill Fellowship's engagement partner for fellowships on issues that affect children in care is CoramBAAF (British Association for Adoption and Fostering). CoramBAAF and Oxfordshire County Council have been working on the adultification awareness campaign with me since spring 2024. The aim was to produce some materials to help to raise professionals' awareness of the issue. The adultification awareness campaign webpage has a poster, brochure and list of questions from CoramBAAF's network of Black social workers that can be used by professionals that want to address this issue further within their organizations.

What was the process like, getting to this point?

It was interesting to see how different organizations approach initiatives of this nature. Both CoramBAAF and Oxfordshire County Council brought their own strengths to the work that managed to bring everything together nicely in the end. The idea of having posters to raise awareness was something a member of Oxfordshire County Council's Youth Justice Partnership Management Board came up with. CoramBAAF agreed to support the campaign to take the idea forward.

What are the next steps now, both for the campaign and for yourself?

In terms of the campaign, I will continue raising awareness of it at my Continuous Professional Sessions, as I did at a recent event for the University of Sussex (which had 100 attendees). I will continue my academic work in this area and championing intersectoral collaborations of this nature. The 100 attendees at the recent event (when I was hoping for at least 10 at best) gives me hope that there is interest in the work and in continuing the dialogue on this issue among professionals.