Transdisciplinary Approaches in Assimilating Power and Diversity to Address Children’s Interface with the Law: A Case Study from India

Abstract

Many children worldwide interact with the justice system, which presents a host of legal and practical problems. The substantial power differentials in children’s interface with the criminal justice system are skewed towards professionals from the judicial, protection and mental health fields. Since legal and judicial systems tend to be particularly patriarchal, paternalistic and hierarchical, they are poorly equipped to grasp the need for democratic and more fluid interactions in order to include marginalized and vulnerable witnesses, such as children. Drawing on the work of SAMVAD (Support, Advocacy & Mental Health Interventions for children in Vulnerable circumstances and Distress) and discussing transdisciplinary methodologies, this chapter reviews SAMVADs’ attempts to address the complex problems of child protection and mental health and law—both with children, and in intersectoral collaboration between service providers and stakeholders from the domains of child mental health and law. It does so with the specific aim to elicit lessons on how to overcome systematic and structural barriers and power asymmetries to bringing stakeholders together in a process of knowledge co-creation.

1 Introduction

Many children worldwide interact with the justice system, which presents a host of legal and practical problems (Marsil et al., 2002). The substantial power differentials in children’s interface with the criminal justice system are skewed towards professionals from the judicial, protection and mental health fields. Since legal and judicial systems tend to be particularly patriarchal, paternalistic and hierarchical, they are poorly equipped to grasp the need for democratic and more fluid interactions in order to include marginalized and vulnerable witnesses, such as children. Furthermore, legal and judicial personnel are seldom adequately trained in child development and child interviewing techniques (Birnbaum et al., 2013), resulting in a lack of clarity on the best ways to help children in their interface with the law. There are similar professional boundaries among mental health service providers, who are skilled in the treatment and care of childhood trauma and child behaviour, but may fail to adequately consider the subjective realities of children’s lives, specifically their interaction with the legal and protection systems, and the often negative impacts on such children (Ramaswamy et al., 2021; Ramaswamy, Seshadri et al., 2022a, 2022b).

While legal and mental health systems have the duty to protect and uphold the rights of child witnesses, many of these professionals do not acknowledge these children as important players; yet these often deal with increasingly complex problems, characterized by tensions and conflicting demands that challenge their professional judgement, leading to handling such problems inconsistently (Olsvik & Saus, 2022), and in ways that are not always in children’s best interests. Consequently, the need to perceive children as social actors and co-constructors of knowledge about their experiences of the world (Brady et al., 2015) is often overlooked, thus contributing to the enormous power differentials between children and professional bodies. This results in children having to contend with difficult legal and judicial processes with little support from the various relevant professionals, which exacerbates their helplessness within the criminal justice system.

The complex problem of children’s interface with the law is therefore not easily resolved from the perspective of a single discipline; it calls for crossing borders between the traditions of academic knowledge, as well as a deliberate attempt to co-create knowledge with relevant non-academic actors, not least the children concerned. The judicial system is charged with obtaining child witness testimony that is valid and reliable—which requires children to have competencies ranging from language, communication and comprehension to observation, memory and recall, as well as an appreciation for telling the truth (Pantell et al., 2017). However, India’s adversarial justice system is known to have negative impacts on children’s language, cognitive and socio-emotional competencies to testify (Eades, 2012; Zajac & Hayne, 2003), as well as causing children to experience secondary trauma and re-traumatization during court processes (Caprioli & Crenshaw, 2017) (Whitcomb, 2003). The lack of adequate support to help children navigate the justice systems, to know that legal systems offer them an opportunity to speak, and to participate in dialogue and discourse that may determine decisions that affect their lives, reflect the contextual influences and power imbalances that shape these adult–child interactions.

Underpinning these power differentials is the concept of epistemic injustice. In her work on the subject, the philosopher Miranda Fricker identifies two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice—when some bias on the part of the listener discredits a speaker’s testimony or report, in the absence of further corroboration; and hermeneutical injustice—when there is a lack of a (systemic) interpretative framework to allow for the speaker’s experiences to be accurately understood (Fricker, 2007). In the context of children’s interface with the law, there are both types of epistemic injustice, as children’s testimonies tend to be discredited on the basis of their age and developmental capacities, and the failure to create interpretative frameworks that take account of their capacities, competencies, life experiences and subjective realities.

Consequently, the concept of epistemic injustice centres around questions of whether children (as opposed to adults) are heard, and believed, and how adults are biased in ways that render children more vulnerable to such injustice (Carel & Györffy, 2014) in the absence of methods and techniques to integrate different orientations and perspectives (e.g. the need to establish facts versus protecting children’s rights and wellbeing). In such a situation, the challenge is to fuse the knowledge and concerns of children and judicial personnel by adapting processes to support children in ‘telling the truth’ (Magnusson et al., 2021), in order to arrive at solutions that ensure children’s rights and promote mental health and wellbeing in their involvement in legal processes, while also allowing the legal and protection professionals to adhere to laws and due process. The tension, as reflected in the concept of boundary dynamics (Regeer & Bunders, 2009), is to work within traditional disciplinary borders while also considering practical realities that call for crossing the divisions between science and society.

Furthermore, despite a considerable body of scientific knowledge on the challenges children experience in their interface with the law, the ‘linear model of expertise’ (Beck, 2011) neither adequately defines nor makes for the translation of science to policy (Hegger et al., 2012). Contrary to assumptions that science and power can be kept distinct (Jasanoff & Wynne, 1998) or that science will propel policy change (Pielke, 2005), scientific agendas are also socially constructed, and scientific research needs to be transformed and contextualized (Latour, 1987). Thus, knowledge co-evolution or co-production is a joint venture between science and society (Jasanoff, 2004; Jasanoff & Martello, 2004).

In principle and practice, for a justice system to address issues of protection and inclusion in its interface with children, the questions and complexities of its design and function need to be addressed through a process of deliberation and co-creation with different knowledge brokers and actors working at the interface of child protection, mental health and law. At present, because legal and judicial, as well as mental health systems, tend to function in a mono-disciplinary fashion, often overwhelmed by numerous responsibilities and agendas, these institutions tend to find it difficult to grasp the need for boundary-transgressive interactions and collaborations across disciplinary borders (Olsvik & Saus, 2022). Other reasons for professionals and organizations to remain within their respective domains include the fear of the unknown, or that the priorities and epistemological perspectives of another discipline might dilute, impinge on or even overpower their own; or perhaps because of the insecurity experienced in leaving one’s own expertise and entering a zone of uncertainty and ‘not-knowing’ (Gaim & Wåhlin, 2016; Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2015; Nicolescu, 2006).

It is in this context that the case study presented in this chapter uses Transdisciplinary Research (TDR) as a way to understand how to facilitate a process of multi-stakeholder deliberation and knowledge co-creation to find more inclusive ways to ensure children’s interface with the law. This is because TDR seeks to enable systemic transformations to address complex problems, by enabling the integration of knowledges from diverse stakeholders who interact according to varying interests, power relations and agreements (Regeer & Bunders, 2009). Various methodologies have been developed to facilitate such processes, and to overcome the numerous challenges in bringing stakeholders together in processes of deliberation and integration.

The study draws on the work of SAMVAD (Support, Advocacy & Mental Health Interventions for children in Vulnerable circumstances and Distress) to understand how TDR methodologies work. It reviews SAMVADs’ attempts to address the complex problems of child protection and mental health and law—both with children, and in intersectoral collaboration between service providers and stakeholders from the domains of child mental health and law with the specific aim to elicit lessons on how to overcome systematic and structural barriers and power asymmetries to bringing stakeholders together in a process of knowledge co-creation.

2 Imperatives for TDR Approaches in Working Towards Child-Inclusive Legal Systems

Transdisciplinarity is a reflexive, integrative, method-driven scientific principle aiming at the solution or transition of societal problems and concurrently of related scientific problems by differentiating and integrating knowledge from various scientific and societal bodies of knowledge. (Lang et al., 2012, pp. 26–27)

One important incentive for using TDR approaches is the realization that some social problems are too complex or ‘wicked’ to solve on the basis of one discipline or through science alone (Adler et al., 2018). These problems are so interconnected and multifaceted that they can only be resolved through processes of deliberation, frame-reflection and consideration of various challenges, consequences, potential solutions and the possible tensions among different stakeholders (Lawrence et al., 2022). Another important aspect of TDR is that of learning and co-creating knowledge in transformational processes (Kok et al., 2021), meaning that an important step in the TDR process is to understand how various stakeholders experience the current situation and their ideas for working towards a better future in any complex arena, (Gaziulusoy & Ryan, 2017), in this case, more child-inclusive legal systems.

TDR approaches are particularly appropriate for child and youth studies (Mitchell & Moore, 2018) and recent efforts range from shaping education on climate change (Cutter-Mackenzie & Rousell, 2019), to how the COVID-19 pandemic opened up new spaces and opportunities for children’s participation (Faria et al., 2021), early intervention services for infants and young children in community settings (Bell et al., 2010), decision-making regarding children and technology (Straker et al., 2022), paediatric and child health-related issues (Reaman, 2004), and co-producing data with children by understanding their experiences and viewpoints through physical movements in their living environment (Camponovo et al., 2023). These examples tend, however, to be limited to collaborating with children and/or with stakeholders in children’s immediate environment, such as parents, teachers and health professionals. Moreover, although such studies present strong arguments for the need to apply transdisciplinary methodologies in child-related work, they fail to take fully into account the critical importance of involving (sufficiently) diverse stakeholders in TDR.

Stakeholders are defined as those who can affect or be affected by a decision or action (Freeman, 1984). Their active involvement and participation, reflecting their interests and knowledge, and integrated into solution-oriented research, is essential to transdisciplinarity and its effective assimilation into policy and practice (Bracken et al., 2015; Hurni & Wiesmann, 2014; Lang et al., 2012). Hence, while parents, teachers, health workers and children are critical stakeholders, and bring transdisciplinary perspectives to children’s issues, they may well find it hard to translate the resulting recommendations into practice. This is because they are less likely to have the power to bring about the necessary policy changes to achieve sustainable, large-scale systemic transformation. Children’s problems thus risk remaining only partially addressed, because even transdisciplinary approaches tend to remain rooted in a specific discipline (Collins, 2017; Nicolescu, 2018), or do not achieve the level of social change to make meaningful impacts on children’s lives.

TDR is especially relevant to children and their problems because one of the normative objectives of diversity among stakeholders in TDR is that everyone who is affected should have a voice in formulating research questions, and also in their implementation and outcomes (Arnstein, 1969; Fiorino, 1990; Hage et al., 2010; Pohl & Hirsch Hadorn, 2007; Stirling, 2008). However, a major challenge in relation to the co-production of knowledge is the asymmetric power among diverse stakeholders; particularly when children are a key stakeholder group, this may adversely affect emerging concerns and perspectives on a given issue. This power imbalance highlights tensions such as the types of conflicts in seeking transdisciplinary solutions, based on differing values, conflicting interests and dissimilar knowledges, and how these affect the fusion of diverse sources of knowledge (Siebenhüner, 2018). In TDR, the diversity of stakeholders is reflected not only in the varied domains and disciplines, or academic and non-academic characteristics, but also by asymmetries in power and influence.

TDR methodologies are designed to provide insights on how to forge collaborations among various stakeholders, and facilitate processes of shaping and improving practices, learning, evaluation and adaptation. Besides being agenda-driven and focused on integrating various types of knowledge, they help to expand and enrich distinct disciplines, and extend the landscape of possible practices of the relevant parties (Guzmán Ruiz et al., 2017); and also gather ‘heterogeneous sets of relationships between epistemic ends and epistemic means’ (Weichselgartner & Truffer, 2015). This may allow for knowledge from less powerful groups, such as children, to be integrated into policy and practice.

3 Challenges in TDR Processes

While much literature supports using TDR approaches for projects that are aimed at social, systemic and policy transformation (such as the current case), their facilitation poses several challenges. Thus, in order to ensure that the objectives of TDR research, entailing inclusive co-creation of improved practices and systems, it is necessary to explore strategies to better understand and overcome these challenges (Gaziulusoy et al., 2016). While some barriers pertain to institutions—such as universities, publishers, research funds, etc.—there are also numerous methodological and epistemological, as well as social and political, challenges. Methodological and epistemological barriers relate to the research content, and the difficulty of integrating knowledge across disciplines, different epistemological orientations and framings of the problems (Brouwer et al., 2018). The social and political level entails different actors transcending their professional domain and accepting/engaging with the knowledge of others, which can lead to conflicts. TDR process facilitation also means recognizing practical versus academic and discipline-based knowledge, and how to integrate these so as to generate solutions to practical problems, by creating new knowledge that transcends disciplinary boundaries—essentially how knowledge can be exchanged and integrated to achieve common goals (Godemann, 2008). The third level concerns the difficulty of acquiring funding for TDR studies and publishing in prestigious journals (Hessels et al., 2018).

Related challenges include the need to address the separation between science and society (i.e. academics versus practitioners), biases in the engagement and influence of various stakeholder groups and the tensions between academic, policy and social outputs and outcomes (Jahn et al., 2022).

A further critical difficulty in TDR concerns the psychological barriers of fear and uncertainty for academics and other professionals. The two modes of the self and its existence, i.e. egocentrism and socio-centrism, can hinder people from considering the possibility that their construction of reality and experiences may be biased or misleading; consequently, they develop little or no (conscious) awareness of the potential for alternative ways to (re)conceptualize these perspectives (Naidoo, 2015). Addressing such challenges calls for flexibility and openness among researchers and other actors to overcome initial reluctance and inertia, leave their ‘comfort’ zone and engage with a meaningful joint problem- and solution-framing process (Pohl et al., 2021).

Another key challenge in facilitating TDR processes with diverse actors is that not everyone speaks the same language, which can lead to mutual misunderstandings. For instance, legal personnel, mental health professionals and children use very different languages. The effectiveness of TDR depends on whether group members (including the TDR team) can engage in self-reflexivity, collectively reflecting on and adapting their ways of working in the face of uncertainty and a lack of clarity (Schippers et al., 2015). According to Pohl et al. (2021), actors in the real world need to reflect upon their perception and significance of the problem, as well as that of others—and this calls for the relatively difficult task of relativizing one’s own perspective as well as accepting the view points of others.

Finally, as mentioned above, the power differentials among diverse actors involved in working towards system change make it hard to strike a balance between the knowledge of those who hold power and those who are marginalized (Bunders et al., 2010)—in our case, for instance, between judicial officers and children—and the relatively little knowledge exchange that traditionally occurred between various actors and across disciplines. It was thus expected that facilitating a TDR process towards enhancing the child–law interface would face these process obstacles. This chapter explores how these were overcome, and what can be learned from them.

4 Study Context

The chapter describes child and law work in India over a timespan of five years, based on the work of SAMVAD, which is a national initiative and integrated resource for child protection, mental health and psychosocial care. Established by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, it is based in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bangalore, a tertiary-level mental health institution under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

Various stakeholders of child protection and mental health services, particularly those working within the government and judicial systems, observed that children’s subjective realities, and consequently, their rights, mental health and wellbeing, are often neglected both because of the systems’ hierarchical workings, and because various systems and stakeholders work in isolation. In recognition of the critical nature of convergence and transdisciplinary approaches for systemic transformations, SAMVAD was set up to address complex problems of child protection and mental health, particularly through intersectoral collaboration among service providers and stakeholders from the fields of (child) welfare, health, education and the law (Ramaswamy, Vijay Sagar et al., 2022b). While SAMVAD’s core expertise is mental health, given the increasingly complex child protection and mental health needs and contexts—such as in families and communities, pre-schools and schools, child care institutions and courts of law—it recognizes the critical importance of understanding core ‘truths’ in and about other domains, including their (systemic) objectives, perspectives and mandates regarding children, to gain an in-depth understanding of how to reform and transform the systems that are responsible for or govern children’s lives. This calls for the convergence of multiple stakeholders in ways that transcend a given discipline (such as mental health or law) to develop effective solutions to these complex concerns and problems.

Initially a state-level community-based child mental health initiative, SAMVAD has pioneered work in the field of children and the law, particularly in the contexts of child sexual abuse and children in conflict with the law, to enable them to have a voice in legal proceedings. These activities have ranged from developing training curriculums integrating child mental health into legal and judicial procedures and engagement in judicial education programmes through the training academies across the country to extending psychosocial, mental health and legal support to individual children, and assisting investigating agencies under Supreme Court direction in cases of child abuse. It has possibly been the only agency to engage in research activities with the judiciary, and to implement a transdisciplinary review of the child sexual abuse law in India. It is against this backdrop that we adopted several transdisciplinary methods and initiatives to integrate the domains of child protection, mental health and the law, in order to find solutions to children’s problems, particularly in relation to their marginalization and powerlessness in their interface with the law.

The chapter reflects on various phases of SAMVAD’s work and the specific case it presents enabled us to understand how transdisciplinary methods could be used in the very complex and sensitive context described above, which involves diverse stakeholder groups characterized by large power differentials. It describes working with two primary groups of stakeholders at opposite ends of the power spectrum, along with a third:

• (i) At one end are children (child witnesses), who lack the developmental and mental health capacities to engage with a criminal justice system that was not designed to accommodate their needs; yet, they must attend, and be heard, in legal and quasi-legal spaces, such as in courts and state juvenile justice systems, to engage effectively in legal processes, which are governed by relatively non-negotiable rules and procedures.

• (ii) At the other end are the judicial personnel, whose role is to ensure the rule of law.

• (iii) Towards the ‘powerful’, albeit less influential, end of the spectrum are child protection officers and mental health service providers, who variously facilitate children’s legal engagement, ensure protection of their rights and safety and support their mental health and wellbeing.

5 Methodology

Our work focuses explicitly on processes in order to understand how and why phenomena occur and evolve, since it is impossible to separate the research process and its outcomes (Garfield, 1990), and hence the methods of inquiry and the content that they generate are an intrinsic part of the results. We use a case-study approach to understand the effectiveness of transdisciplinarity, based on the transdisciplinary field practice methodologies we developed.

Crucial to this, in this context, is to acknowledge that in transdisciplinarity it is hard if not impossible to discern what belongs to the phenomenon being investigated and what to the context in which it arises. We therefore adopted a qualitative case-study approach which, as Yin explains (Yin, 1984, p. 23), is a form of ‘empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context; when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident; and in which multiple sources of evidence are used’. This methodology enabled us to understand the contextual nuances of children’s engagement with legal processes in courts and other settings, necessitating interface with the law and its systems, facilitated by mental health service providers and by legal and judicial personnel.

5.1 Data Collection and Analysis

Our transdisciplinary research used a mixed-methods design (predominantly qualitative) to understand the complexities pertaining to child and law issues. These methods ranged from deliberations and integrated review consultations with judicial personnel, to field practice methods for use in direct interventions with children.

• Participant Observation

We used participant observation in the context of child sexual abuse to understand how children responded in court, based on the transdisciplinary field practice methodologies we had developed to use with them. The support personnel recorded their observations of the court or trial process, including social interactions and communication between the child witnesses with the court officers.

Participant observation was also used in training and teaching, during which we observed the types of responses the training sessions elicited from mental health professionals and judicial personnel, including how far they generated discussion, (divergent) viewpoints, dialogues and ultimate convergence and the relevance to challenges and dilemmas in their own practice.

• Focus Group Discussions

We used focus group discussions (FGDs) in training and capacity-building initiatives, deliberations, and in the review of consultation on the law with mental health professionals and judicial personnel. We conducted about 35 FGDs with judicial groups (over 1,000 participant judges) and some 10 FGDs with mental health professionals (around 500 mental health service providers). At the end of each FGD, the participants’ opinions were elicited in discussion and in feedback forms. These focused on the issues and learning methods they had found most helpful, and the relevance to their practice of the transdisciplinary collaboration and the issues discussed. Process-related feedback on the methodologies used in specific sessions was also obtained throughout the consultations and training programmes.

5.2 Outcomes of Our Transdisciplinary Methods and Initiatives Used by Other Agencies

Following the development and use of our transdisciplinary methods, we examined high-impact references to our work related to child law. Since our methodologies are in the public domain, we wanted to see how far our work had influenced other agencies’ training programmes and field practice, and government policy.

We then analysed patterns, challenges and successes related to the use of transdisciplinary methods and processes for evidence of effective knowledge integration and collaboration, to understand the impact of transdisciplinary approaches on addressing complex issues. For instance, based on the dialogue and responses in the stakeholder groups and their feedback, we sought to understand how far this knowledge had been assimilated in relation to understanding how to support child witnesses in adversarial justice systems: for instance, in the case of mental health service providers, we followed up on their case work and interventions with sexually abused children to understand whether they were implementing the child–law interface methodologies we had shared with them; and whether they were disseminating such knowledge and practice among their trainees/students. In the case of judicial personnel, we examined High Court judgements, for example, to understand whether child-oriented adjudicatory methods and processes were adopted.

6 Findings

6.1 Practical Solutions for Systemic Transformation in Child-Law Interfaces

6.1.1 Practice Methodologies for Understanding Children’s Perspectives and Assisting Them in Their Interface with the Law

Based on our direct interactions and interventions with children in contact with the law, we developed three methodologies to use with them, with a view to (i) eliciting and understanding their developmental capacities and mental health issues; (ii) enabling them to navigate the complexities of the law and judicial systems; (iii) minimizing the harmful and traumatizing impact of the legal system, and ensuring children’s best interests by being aware of their developmental and protection concerns, and their mental health status, and also of their rights to participation and agency. These methodologies, depending on the stage of the legal procedure, were designed to be implemented by various stakeholders in mental health, protection and law.

These practice methodologies are transdisciplinary in nature because the psycho-legal assessments and interventions they encompass are primarily located in the field of mental health, but are applied in the legal context. Through directly interviewing children in therapeutic and forensic contexts, using creative and child-friendly methods, they seek to understand and assess children’s psychosocial vulnerabilities, mental health issues and their cognitive capacities; the implications of how these psychological assessments and interventions play out in the legal arena by equipping children to provide testimony in court, or recommendations regarding juvenile transfer and rehabilitation. The methodologies, which relied almost completely on our direct engagement with children and are based on child rights, developmental and mental health frameworks, ensured children’s participation in legal processes. Thus, they represent a major effort to alter the power imbalance by ensuring that the marginalized and vulnerable have a voice in processes that will affect their life.

6.1.2 Development and Implementation of Transdisciplinary Capacity-Building Workshops for Multiple Stakeholders

A vital part of implementing TDR processes entailed integrating the various ideas proposed by stakeholder groups, analysing the recurring themes and patterns and drawing out themes and content to feed into subsequent rounds of training and capacity building. Thus, the SAMVAD team continually engaged in analysis, which enabled it to select and use stories or cases from real-life experiences and interactions between children and which reflected child development, ethical, practical and systemic tensions and dilemmas. These themes and stories helped to refine, revise and sometimes completely change the contents, methodology and structure of the existing training curriculums and programmes for judicial personnel and mental health service providers.

Thus, building on our transdisciplinary approaches and what we learned from them, we developed India’s first-ever transdisciplinary professional training courses on child and law issues. Courses for judicial personnel aimed to facilitate an understanding of the psychosocial and mental health contexts and vulnerabilities of sexually abused children, and of children in conflict with the law, to enable them to integrate knowledge of abuse, trauma and other adverse circumstances into how they interview children and pass judgements. Others were designed to introduce mental health and legal dimensions of forensics regarding sexually abused children and children in conflict with law, focus on clinical and psycho-legal assessments, and therapeutic and court-support interventions, and were geared to secondary and tertiary mental health service providers and paediatricians. The training courses promote intersectional methods to alleviate the negative impacts of children’s interface with the criminal justice system. The transdisciplinary element lies in content that encompasses themes such as linkages between child rights, protection, mental health and legal procedures, capacity assessments for children in contact with the law, forensic interviewing methods for children, pre-trial and in-trial interventions for supporting children and provision of expert witness testimony (see Fig. 10.1).

Fig. 10.1

Training curriclums developed for key stakeholders

These have been used in training and capacity-building workshops for the stakeholder groups at state and national levels. Evaluations of the training workshops indicate that participants feel that these truly attempt to address the ‘grey areas’ and dilemmas that they face in their clinics and courtrooms regarding children’s contact with the law. The quotes in Box 10.2 reflect various ways in which participants internalized the transdisciplinary approaches and methods used to prompt reflection and dialogue in the training and education programmes—in particular, they highlight the importance of the methodologies, the room for discussion on dilemmas and difficult issues in field practice, and their changed perspectives. In addition to helping to navigate tensions in child and law work, the workshops resulted in the co-production of knowledge as participants shared experiences and challenges. Furthermore, knowledge co-produced in one group of stakeholders (such as judges) was shared at a subsequent workshop with another group of stakeholders (such as mental health professionals); thus different stakeholder groups had access to each other’s perspectives and dilemmas through the facilitators, who are also the transdisciplinary researchers. Such exchange of knowledge and viewpoints helps to transcend disciplinary barriers and allows for new information to flow between different stakeholders—thus helping to iron out, to some extent, power imbalances between adult stakeholders.

6.1.3 Policy Transformation

A tremendously important outcome, and a testimony to the need for transdisciplinary approaches to resolve problems relating to children’s interface with the law, was a landmark judgement passed by the Supreme Court of India, namely the Barun Chandra Thakur v. Master Bholu & Anr (Barun Chandra Thakur v. Master Bholu & Anr. (2022 SCC OnLine SC 870), 2022). In this case, a 17-year-old came into conflict with the law for allegedly killing a younger child, and the Supreme Court drew on the practice methodologies for children SAMVAD had developed on juvenile transfer, to emphasize the importance of mental health assessments, and the need to use rehabilitative and treatment-based approaches to children in conflict with the law, in recognition of their (neuro)developmental, mental health and psychosocial vulnerabilities. Thus, not only did this judgement recognize the need to adopt transdisciplinary methodologies to address difficult legal questions that address the tensions of child rights, protection, law, mental health, rehabilitation and public safety, but in doing so, it moved the child law, protection and mental health systems towards systemic change by directing all relevant parties to adopt the transdisciplinary practice methodology that SAMVAD had developed.

The Supreme Court direction is thus an example of how the use of transdisciplinary methodologies in shifting the perspectives of powerful and influential stakeholders could result in systemic changes in policy and practice. The Supreme Court’s direction is binding on all Juvenile Justice Boards, Special Courts, mental health and child protection service providers across the country. Compliance is likely to result in use of standardized methods and the transformation of child and law work, both of which may well lead to large-scale and sustainable change in decisions pertaining to child justice.

6.1.4 Generation of New Scientific Knowledge

The use of TDR approaches, through methodological innovations and generation of diverse perspectives, gave rise to insights and new scientific knowledge that informed both policy and practice in the context of child–law interface. For example, guidelines for mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse and proformas for decisions based on child rights in juvenile transfer were developed on the basis of scientific and empirical evidence; and the newly developed methods are therefore scientific ways to approach child work in the legal context. We developed a repository of materials, such as assessment proformas, activity books for children and training manuals and demo videos, all of which are available on the SAMVAD website.

Box 10.1: Research and Information Dissemination: List of Publications

Ramaswamy, S., Seshadri, S., & Bunders-Aelen, J. (2023). Transdisciplinary training for forensic mental health in child sexual abuse in India. The Lancet Psychiatry, 10(5), 317–318.

Ramaswamy, S., Kommu, J.V.S., & Seshadri, S. (2023). Support, advocacy, and mental health interventions for children in vulnerable circumstances and distress: a unique public child mental health initiative in India. World Social Psychiatry, 5(2), 166–169.

Ramaswamy, S., Devgun, M., Seshadri, S., & Bunders-Aelen, J. (2023). “The child needs to tell it to me in words”: Barriers and Facilitators to Witness Competencies in Child Sexual Abuse Trials. The International Journal of Children's Rights, 31(2), 403–443.

Ramaswamy, S., Devgun, M., Seshadri, S., & Bunders-Aelen, J. (2023). Balancing the law with children’s rights to participation and decision-making: Practice guidelines for mandatory reporting processes in child sexual abuse. Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 81, 103464.

Ramaswamy, S., Sagar, J. V., & Seshadri, S. (2022). A transdisciplinary public health model for child and adolescent mental healthcare in low-and middle-income countries. The Lancet Regional Health-Southeast Asia, 3.

Ramaswamy, S., Seshadri, S., & Bunders-Aelen, J. (2022). Shifting landscapes of global child mental health: Imperatives for transdisciplinary approaches. Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 69, 103002.

Ramaswamy, S., Ashok, S., & Seshadri, S. (2022). Mental health issues and challenges of children in Karnataka. In M.R. Narayana (Ed.), Public finances for development of children in Karnataka: policy issues and challenges. (In Press by FPI-UNICEF).

Ramaswamy, S.. Seshadri, S., & Bunders-Aelen, J. (2021). Navigating juvenile transfer laws: the application of vulnerability, mental health, and rights frameworks in psycholegal assessments of children in conflict with the law. In S.O. Okapo (Ed.), Innovations in global mental health (pp. 1–30). Springer.

Ramaswamy, S., Seshadri, S., & Bunders-Aelen, J. (2021). Building a research agenda for mental health assessments in resolving legal dilemmas on adolescent sexual consent. Asian Journal of Psychiatry, 66, 102907.

To ensure that our methods are widely accessible to practitioners of child work, we selected journals that either have a global impact but are largely mono-disciplinary, to reach readers who may not be familiar with transdisciplinarity (e.g. The Lancet Psychiatry); or are widely read by practitioners in a given country or cultural context (e.g. the Asian Journal of Psychiatry). These publications (see Box 10.1) reflect how TDR may not only lead to creating collaborative knowledge and social transformation, but also contribute critically to generating new knowledge and publishing of scientific research.

6.2 Development of TDR Methodological Approaches and Strategies

6.2.1 Engagement of Homogeneous Groups

The recognizable phases in the process start with a negotiation of how all stakeholders perceived and related to the current and established (procedural) interactions between children and the legal system. Given that the research process is strongly influenced by relational features across the stakeholder networks, such as power asymmetries, interpersonal trust and cultural differences, we deliberately worked separately with each stakeholder group in view of their different agendas and priorities with regard to children’s interface with the law. For example, judicial officers’ mandate is to implement the law, and to apply impartial justice in ways that allow children to be protected; child mental health service providers’ agendas are more keenly focused on ensuring children’s mental wellbeing—which could often be at odds with the law, whose priority is to elicit accurate evidence. In sum, the reasons for establishing homogeneous groups, and why they worked were:

• They helped create a safe and empathic space in which members of homogeneous stakeholder groups would feel free to share varied and difficult problems and dilemmas with colleagues, who are likely to validate rather than counter their experiences.

• They avoided direct confrontation between stakeholder groups with significantly different perspectives (no matter how ‘child-unfriendly’ it may seem) as presenting more critical or ‘radical’ approaches might result in defensiveness and insecurity, and less openness and inclination to consider new perspectives.

• They allowed for forums to introduce new knowledge and information from child mental health and/or the law in ways that were applicable to all present; and to offer alternative perspectives, including possible solutions for the stakeholders to consider, for them gradually to absorb these perspectives, methods or skills into their field or practice (again common to all group members).

Moreover, our experience with heterogeneous groups was largely unsuccessful because of the different interests and agendas, as well as linguistic and semantic difficulties; for instance, not only do children not speak the same language as the technical jargon that adult stakeholders use, but even among the latter the language of the law is very different from that of mental health. Therefore, while our stakeholder groups were diverse, and we ensured that knowledge was transferred from the actors of one group to those of another. In seeking to effect transformations in stakeholder interactions and prevailing discourses, the methods were used simultaneously: information from one was fed into another, to understand another (group of) stakeholders’ responses. For example, we presented judicial officers with knowledge from child mental health (through deliberations and research studies), to identify the legal constraints to assimilating these, and used the resulting understanding in refining the practice guidelines and methodologies we developed to use with children. We did this by presenting children (using simple language and age-appropriate life examples and analogies) with the provisions of the law concerning child sexual abuse and juvenile justice—and used their responses, questions and concerns to inform the practice guidelines and methodologies.

6.2.2 Co-construction of Knowledge in Multi-stakeholder Processes of TDR

• Use of Creative and Experiential Methodologies

While we engaged in a more ‘formal’ implementation of research methodologies, such as survey questionnaires, schedules for FGDs and participant observation, our TDR methodologies extended to include a plethora of creative and experiential methodologies. The methods of engagement included various creative, participatory methodologies such as art, film, role plays, simulation games and case analysis to enable participants to orient themselves to children’s perspectives and reflect deeply on their struggles in engaging with the law. These activity-based methods were designed to inquire about children’s experiences or the field practice of (adult) stakeholders, to elicit perspectives, opinions and dilemmas for deeper reflection and further dialogue in order to arrive at solutions. Thus, the (meta) processing that followed these methods applied an inquiry-based approach to consultations, training and education programmes, to allow for co-creation of new knowledge and alternative perspectives. This approach was also based on our belief that individual and systemic transformation can rarely be coerced, and that with hierarchical institutions such as the judiciary, or even with proprietorial disciplines such as mental health, change needs to be incremental rather than radical.

• Implementation of Deliberations and Consultations

In one of the judicial education programmes, the research team explained that although the judicial academy’s (well-intentioned) titling of it as ‘Sensitization of Judges…’ on the child law and its processes, our objective was not to ‘sensitize’ them. Rather, we sought to facilitate a deeper examination of the implementation of child laws and procedures through a ‘developmental and mental health lens’ to enable judges to consider skills and strategies that may enable them to navigate the many challenges of working with child witnesses. The judges expressed relief that there was at last some acknowledgement that they were not ‘ignorant of or insensitive to’ children in their courtrooms.

Box 10.2: Deliberations

A deliberation is a collaborative process of discussing contested issues by considering various perspectives with the aim of forming opinions and guiding judgment; while deliberative practice can take various forms such as discussions, role-playing exercises, or formal debates, it incorporates sustained and appropriate arguments, with a view to exploring diverse perspectives and informing various decisions. Given the formal and hierarchical structure of the judiciary, we opted for a form of structured debate on three motions, with arguments advanced in favour of, and against, each. A panel of experts from mental health and legal domains, i.e. judges from the High Court and Supreme Court, moderated by child mental health professionals from a national tertiary-care mental health institution, also providing their own perspectives on issues in order to ultimately influence the officers’. Thus, the panellists served a strategic purpose in including child development and mental health agendas, as well as strongly presenting child-centred perspectives in what judicial officers typically perceive to be core legal work.

Such a response is indicative of the approaches that emphasize openness and reflexivity: that they can create a sense of joint engagement in a change process (rather than of being passive recipients of others’ change efforts), and therefore help break with underlying assumptions about the ‘us versus them’ type of thinking that serves to exacerbate bias and feelings of ‘otherness’. In this case, judicial officers were sending a strong message that they were also caring about children—as much as mental health professionals were, perhaps—thus, humanizing the practice of law. In turn, this helped shift the perspective of mental health professionals, who started to develop ideas about other actors in the system, and that judges may not be as uninterested or unable to think about children as was imagined.

This anecdote also underscores the effectiveness of our transdisciplinary approach to integrating child-centred perspectives that straddle the domains of child rights and protection, mental health and law, with the goal of initiating systemic change, albeit incrementally. The aim was first to understand the thinking and perspectives, including the challenges, of judicial personnel working at the district level in matters concerning children, and then to integrate child mental health perspectives into their approaches and methods. As part of the TDR objective of (co)production of knowledge, we implemented deliberations and review consultations and a quantitative research study (see below), to facilitate spaces where new knowledge could emerge from a joint sense of urgency and need to change—and set the stage for the requisite education and training programmes.

Deliberations were conducted with judicial personnel on how key aspects of the child sexual abuse and juvenile justice legislation helped to establish an ongoing dialogue with judicial officers from across the country, and better understand their current thinking on child law, including its interpretation and consequent (gaps and challenges in) implementation. The deliberations not only elicited judicial views and understandings of child law, but also enabled the co-production of knowledge through an exchange of perspectives between judicial and mental health domains. In allowing for judicial systems to shift from didactic training to learning and education that was based on sharing and reflection between colleagues and with leaders, the use of transdisciplinary methods also helped create a more equal platform for dialogue in an essentially very hierarchical system. Furthermore, since they comprised High Court and Supreme Court judges they also served as platforms for strategic advocacy, critical in working with stakeholders who are bound in role and function to organizations that are inherently based on hierarchy and positional power.

An integrated consultation on the Indian child sexual abuse law was conducted, with the participation of judges of the Supreme Court and of the State High Courts, senior police personnel, child mental health professionals and legal academics. This consultation enabled the use of transdisciplinary approaches to ensure the integration of diverse professional and psychosocial perspectives in children’s interface with the law. With a focus on complex and controversial questions regarding the criminal justice system and its applicability to children (such as mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, and the age of consent), such consultations, by reframing concerns about the law regarding children, generated two key outcomes: (i) convergence among stakeholders on possible solutions to solutions to the complex problem of children’s interface with the law; and (ii) agreements on the need for implementation to be in line with procedural and child-inclusive justice, by taking into account children’s (developmental and mental health) competencies, and consequently, for courts to work in partnership with mental health professionals in eliciting evidence and providing other assistance to child witnesses. Thus, the use of transdisciplinary methodologies, through convergence and co-production of knowledge between these two key groups of adult stakeholders, enhanced the prospects for large-scale, sustainable impact on the application of justice, and for transformations in child policy and practice.

6.2.3 Employment of Non-linear Pathways in TDR

This case study can be understood as a non-linear pathway towards a more child-inclusive legal system in India (see Fig. 10.2), with (i) some distinguishable phases and steps, including deliberation and reflection on the current state and where we want to go; (ii) steps towards creating alternative practices and policy by integrating various knowledge and ideas; and (iii) reflecting on the impact of these new practices. These steps were part and parcel of a context in which some of SAMVAD’s existing work (such as training professionals on child-sensitivity), and that were adapted to fit the objectives of a joint TDR process.

Fig. 10.2

(Source Authors used an image of W.B. Yeats’s ‘A Vision’, which pertains to his gyre theory—to depict the spiralling cycles of the transdisciplinary research processes)

Transdisciplinary practice and research processes towards more child-inclusive legal systems

As shown in Fig. 10.2, the transdisciplinary practice and research approach, in loops or spiralling cycles, deepened our understanding of the issues by surfacing or identifying more potential problems and solutions. This continuous process of exchanging perspectives and responses between stakeholder groups helped to identify (possible) ways to integrate very diverse priorities, and enabled an analytical process in which the stakeholders co-constructed knowledge. Finally, this iterative engagement generated ‘widening circles’ of thought until saturation was reached in the sense of being enough to yield feasible solutions to address a major part of the problem. In keeping with our goal of developing practice-oriented solutions to contribute to social transformation, at every spiral of the ever-widening circle of knowledge and understanding, we engaged in reflection to ensure that successive rounds of social action and transdisciplinary methods were indeed leading us (closer) to our desired outcome for children.

These adaptations included, for instance, a more expansive network of stakeholders who were considered part of the research process, including a more deliberate attempt to: (i) better understand and include children’s perspectives and experiences; (ii) (re) conceptualize training content and methodologies facilitation to allow for enhanced co-creation of knowledge and improved field practices; and (iii) ensure a stronger focus on designing and presenting new methods for use in the procedures governing children’s interface with the law (such as methods and guidelines for use with children), based on stakeholders’ diverse inputs.

In fact, what greatly contributed to the adaptations were the newly generated scientific knowledge and methodologies. While they were an end in themselves, the guidelines and proformas for use with children, activity books and training videos were also used in capacity-building initiatives to generate further new and alternative perspectives on child-centred legal work among mental health service providers; the findings from the deliberations with judicial personnel on juvenile transfer decisions provided the basis for the quantitative research study on the issue—which in turn served to inform policy and practice in judicial systems.

6.2.4 De-briefing and Reflexive Monitoring

Every initiative, whether in the form of a deliberation or training programme, was followed up with a detailed de-briefing in which the SAMVAD team members participated. These de-briefings focused on challenges pertaining to participant stakeholders who were less open or willing to engage in TDR processes, how a given group overall seemed to be experiencing and receiving the processes and methodologies. Such reflexive monitoring also led to iterative decisions on changes and additions in terms of content and methodology in order to enhance engagement or to move towards possible solutions. Given that content and process factors are highly interconnected and influence each other, when the complexity of the problem and content threaten to overwhelm people, there is a tendency to cling to professional boundaries with greater tenacity, and thus be less open to alternative perspectives and viewpoints. Reflexive de-briefing and monitoring helped us identify these blockages, and analytically examine their underlying reasons, as well as introducing new methodologies and approaches.

6.2.5 Communicating Research to Policymakers and Those Responsible for Implementing the Law

In an effort to address the divides between researchers and academics, and policymakers and practitioners, and also to influence law and policy, we always shared our new scientific knowledge—our research findings—with policymakers and practitioners. Indeed, one of the key outcomes of our transdisciplinary research towards systemic transformation came from a relatively unexpected quarter, namely the quantitative study on judicial decision-making. Our dissemination strategy led the academic, law and policy communities, who work according to diverse rules, timelines and mandates, to converge on solutions related to children’s interface with the law. The two-pronged strategy included a brief presentation of research findings, including simply elucidating the implications for policy, practice and training (avoiding academic jargon), and the inclusion of judges from the Supreme Court of India to discuss the significance of the study, particularly in terms of child law practice.

Although our research team made no specific efforts to advocate for changes in policy and practice, the discussions in the research dissemination forum, particularly among judicial officers, moved naturally towards advocacy in favour of child-centred inter-operations and implementation of the law. This, and the apex Court’s recognition of the importance of TDR approaches, was reflected in the remarks made by Judges and Members of the Juvenile Justice Committee of the Supreme Court of India in the course of the (country-wide) dissemination of the study findings¹:

‘…There is an imperative for judicial personnel to work with mental health professionals and non-judicial members of the juvenile justice boards, in transdisciplinary ways, that adhere to constitutional safeguards, and knowledge from legal and non-legal disciplines…the means for ensuring [child] accountability should be grounded in child and adolescent psychology…transferring a child or adolescent to adult court must be invoked only as a measure of last resort, in exceptional circumstances…

This study will contribute to judicial education and decision-making on juvenile transfer…

The nature and quality of judicial education will ultimately determine the ease and fairness with which judicial transfer decisions are made. I hope the study will scientifically guide judicial discretion and limit the propensity for arbitrariness…I would like to appeal to all the Directors of the Judicial Academies to have a separate training program and curricula on Sections 16, 16 and 18 of the [Juvenile Justice] Act…with the appropriate resource persons…’

—Judge and Chairperson, Juvenile Justice Committee, Supreme Court of India

‘…The entire discussion on Section 15 and transfer of [juvenile] cases is a very, very important one…from the point of view of criminal jurisprudence, from [that of] child rights…outside assistance [for the legal system] must be taken whenever available, there is no reason to be hesitant about it [in transfer decision-making]…’

—(Former) Judge and Chairperson, Juvenile Justice Committee, Supreme Court of India

TDR findings can, if disseminated in ways that are dispassionate and impartial, be very powerful in themselves: allowing stakeholders to judge their implications may propel them to advocate in support of vulnerable groups. Such dissemination forums play a critical role in enhancing communication and interaction among researchers, policymakers and the judiciary, and consequently in a gradual increase in the potential impact of research on social attitudes, practice and policy with regard to children and vulnerable groups.

7 Emerging Challenges and Roadblocks in Our TDR Journey

Despite our many (successful) efforts to implement TDR approaches in the child–law interface, and its role in helping to address various challenges, there remained some outstanding concerns that need to be addressed in any future work in this area.

7.1 The Impact of Knowledge Integration on Power Imbalances

7.1.1 Integrating Children’s Thinking and Worldview

Our transdisciplinary methodology involved the participation of marginalized and vulnerable children whose perceptions were at the centre of our solutions for their interface with the law. Given children’s thinking and worldviews, depending on their developmental abilities, it was sometimes challenging to involve them in dialogues on the issue. For instance, it is difficult for them to understand the procedural workings of the court, let alone the legal philosophies and ethics that underpin them.

Thus, although we sought to create an equitable platform for stakeholders’ engagement, the inherent capacities of individual stakeholder groups might make this particularly difficult. Consequently, we had to adopt different forms of communication, such as simplified language and games, stories and play in engaging with children, to help them understand legal perspectives and engage with judicial systems.

7.1.2 Hegemonies That Hinder

The law and how it is applied are largely inflexible, including court procedures and judicial officers’ almost absolute belief in the adversarial system of justice. These issues do not align with children’s worldviews and ways of thinking. Judicial officers also exercise authority over other stakeholders by virtue of the systemic power vested in them, namely child protection functionaries, child rights activists, mental health professionals, and of course over children themselves. Consequently, a child’s trauma might find limited space in the courtroom as might a mental health professional’s advocacy to consider the child’s developmental capacities and mental health status in the operations of the law. Since the application of the law is largely non-negotiable, the challenge was to work within the hegemony of the judiciary, and to acknowledge some degree of powerlessness in our endeavours to integrate scientific knowledge in legal practice.

However, the transdisciplinary methodologies of deliberations, consultations and training interventions enabled a deeper level of qualitative interactions with judges. We gradually understood that judges, though apparently powerful, also work within a larger hegemonic, paternalistic, even patriarchal system—none of which may be empowering for an individual judge attempting to adjudicate in the case of an individual child. Transdisciplinary methodologies made for closer and more open discussions with judges, helping us to realize that despite their seeming inflexibility, they were often naturally inclined to integrating multiple domains and stakeholders in the dispensation of (social) justice, including that of children. These methodologies also helped to coalesce different types of knowledge and practice, juxtaposing these to create room for a shift in perspectives, in ways that ‘ordinary’ social science research may not easily be able to do. The resulting insights enabled us to find alternative solutions that were feasible from a legal perspective to assist children in their interface with the law.

7.2 Communication and Collaboration Barriers Among Diverse Stakeholders

7.2.1 Breaking Out of the Mono-Disciplinary Mode: Why Our Domains Are So Dear to Us

In our experience, each group of professionals or stakeholders tends to remain within their disciplinary boundaries to pursue their core roles and functions. This was particularly challenging for any type of work that sought to provide holistic and integrated support to children, and find solutions to their problems, by converging diverse stakeholder perspectives and professional expertise.

The underlying issue points to psychological rather than knowledge- and skill-related factors. These may pertain to the anxiety and insecurity we experience when we move out of our comfort zones, in which we feel competent and confident that we have the right knowledge and skills. TDR entails moving beyond these disciplinary confines—and stakeholders may fear that the priorities and objectives of another discipline could impinge on their own, possibly uncovering tensions (such as those between the professional disciplines of mental health and law) that they do not feel equipped to address.

The collaborative spirit of transdisciplinarity, which goes between, across and beyond disciplines, and which informed our judicial deliberations and consultations, and our forensic training and capacity-building curricula and programmes, helped various stakeholders overcome disciplinary barriers. These initiatives deliberately integrated child-centred knowledge from both legal and mental health perspectives, allowing for intensive professional exchanges that enabled stakeholders to learn about an unfamiliar subject.

7.2.2 Restricting the (Researcher’s) Competent Self

A preference for mono-disciplinarity is related to competence. We often feel the need to assert ourselves to prove our (superior) knowledge and skills, especially in our primary domain. Competence is cherished and helpful, often coming from profound socio-cultural and family values and beliefs. It can therefore be daunting for researchers to have to discard this competence and embrace transdisciplinarity—to accept a lack of expertise in order to be able to receive new knowledge, participate in different ways of thinking and accept alternative perspectives. To replace the ensuing anxiety with the realization that transdisciplinarity can be liberating, because it affords a space unencumbered by the burden of competence, is a process of developing psychological readiness. It takes time to be able to move away from what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls ‘the danger of a single story’, to experience the joy of curiosity and wonder, as we immerse ourselves in the subjective realities and challenges in others’ lives. But only then can we be effortlessly empathic in our approach and interactions with our research respondents and internalize their stories and perspectives—be they children, judges or administrators—so as devise solutions that are located in their particular life experiences.

7.2.3 Human Resource Development for Transdisciplinary Research

The methodological approach we developed relied heavily on facilitation skills. The research team had to embrace a transdisciplinary ethos and have a range of technical and psychological skills in order to facilitate transdisciplinary engagement. These included (i) technical knowledge in their main area of expertise (i.e. law or mental health) and related communication and teaching skills; (ii) a basic understanding of other relevant disciplines, and a willingness to learn about them, in order to connect their knowledge in discussions and workshops to the main issue; and (iii) psychological skills, particularly being open to accepting and reflecting on new perspectives, and freely allowing for dissent.

Given the general preference for mono-disciplinarity, and psychological orientations that often favour individualism, competence and competition, it is not easy to find and retain professionals with the necessary skills and attitude, or create a team of transdisciplinary researchers. Building such a team is time-consuming, needing hours of careful mentorship to instil the requisite skills and work methods, and ensure that individuals’ goals are largely aligned—for only then can teaching and learning initiatives with external stakeholder groups effectively engage in practising transdisciplinary methodologies.

7.3 Effecting Social Transformation

7.3.1 Challenges in Translating Research into Policy

One of the challenges in our TDR for transformation, in terms of assimilating diversity from a professional domain and disciplinary perspective, was integrating scientific knowledge with the implementation of child rights and the development of policy and law. Initially it was difficult for scientific knowledge and global evidence on best practices in relation to children in conflict with law and sexually abused children to find traction in law and human rights communities. The evidence on adolescent neurodevelopment and the negative consequences of using retributive (versus rehabilitative) approaches to help change children’s behaviour, for example, were not readily accepted as considerations for child-centred implementation of the law.

A possible reason for this is the divide between academics or researchers and practitioners (including professionals or service providers and policymakers). Although these groups should inform each other in mutually beneficial ways, they tend to be somewhat isolated and separate. This is because the respective stakeholder groups work with different timeframes, use different language and communication styles and have different professional goals. For instance, researchers often have longer timeframes, and use language that practitioners and policymakers do not readily understand. This may lead practitioners to question the relevance of research as being ‘too theoretical’ and ‘far removed from field realities’.

Given the research–practice divide, we endeavoured in our deliberations, consultations and training programmes to present scientific knowledge and evidence on child mental health and law-related issues, adapting the information to the relevant professional backgrounds, roles and functions. We presented our research findings in ways that made knowledge and information accessible and relevant to their contexts of practice, also suggesting how the findings could be used to implement existing child laws and policies more effectively as a way to find better solutions to children’s problems. Again, this approach was gentle and non-confrontational, presenting alternative perspectives and solutions before law and policy audiences, to steer them towards incremental (rather than radical) changes in policy and practice—often the only way forward in strongly hierarchical systems.

7.3.2 Constraints of Communities and Culture

Ultimately, no matter how much child rights activists and policymakers may promote issues of children’s rights and best interests, or how committed child protection and mental health service providers are to ensuring children’s safety and wellbeing, and how conscientious judicial personnel are about interpreting and implementing laws in a child-centred manner, children are subject to the ambiguities, inconsistencies and biases of their own families and communities. In the Indian context, the socio-cultural taboos and stigma that surround sexuality and abuse, and public and community prejudices towards children in conflict with the law, are exceedingly hard to overcome.

We found that despite our child-centred methodologies, unless the children’s families and communities are willing to support them by permitting a child victim to testify in court, or following through with rehabilitation and reintegration processes, our aspirations for children to be able to access justice, and safety and wellbeing, come to naught. The question, therefore, particularly in the light of issues concerning children who in most situations require their family’s assent, is how to address families and communities in ways that will enable them to participate in transforming (their) children’s lives.

8 Discussion

This case study sought to understand how TDR methodologies may be applied to effectively address challenges in convening stakeholders to co-create a more child-inclusive legal system in a context characterized by considerable power asymmetries—and to examine their outcomes and challenges. We described SAMVAD’s experience in India of bringing together various stakeholders in order to transform the nature of child–law interface. One of the key objectives for involving diverse stakeholders in TDR is to promote democratic ideologies by emphasizing processes of inclusion, improving outcomes through eliciting relevant knowledge and risk perceptions from different stakeholders, and consequently, to generate effective and valid decisions and solutions to problems (Fiorino, 1990; Stirling, 2008). According to the notion of ‘knowledge democracy’, dominant and non-dominant social actors have equal access and ability to participate in resolving social problems, so that both are heard in the decision-making processes leading to research and policy mandates—and which can be achieved with the use of TDR methods (Bunders et al., 2010). The democratic or normative argument for inclusion also asserts that those affected by research and innovation outcomes should be involved in the process (Kok et al., 2021), particularly through democratic methods of participation and deliberation (Jasanoff, 2003; Latour, 2004). The issue of deliberative democracy may also be viewed through the lens of epistemic justice (Catala, 2015), so that we are better able to identify such situations, and failures of inclusion, within deliberative spaces, and to take measures to construct spaces that are more inclusive, thus promoting democratic ideologies (Dieleman, 2015).

From the perspective of epistemic injustice, when knowledge systems reflect social prejudices and biases, they result in discrediting and misinterpreting marginalized groups, thus further excluding them (Bhakuni & Abimbola, 2021). The age and developmental lens is one way to view children and child-related research; equally important is how adults perceive children and their role and influence in society (Klyve, 2019). Our interaction with others is essentially based ‘on the categories that we spontaneously place them in’ (Gilbert, 2009, p. 93). The ‘very things that make children children’ is what contributes to their ‘otherness’; and there is a need to acknowledge this otherness in social science research and in society more broadly, by listening to their voices and perceiving the world through their eyes and thus bringing their perspectives into practice (Jones, 2001). Our (adult) failure to do so is what lies at the core of power asymmetries, such as in children’s interface with the law. In our case, prevalent assumptions about children’s capacities to shape decisions about their lives potentially interfere with their participation in knowledge co-production with regard to legal processes. But our engagement with children and inclusion of their subjective experiences and worldviews reflects how our transdisciplinary approaches actively addressed issues of epistemic injustice, and indeed its consequences for the very groups that were marginalized and powerless when they are unable to contribute to knowledge and decision-making.

Our transdisciplinary work, contending with tensions between children’s perspectives and the roles and functions of judicial personnel and mental health service providers, are reflective of the Strumińska-Kutra’s analytical framework (Strumińska-Kutra, 2016) on some of the major power-related tensions that pervade collaborative approaches to research, namely tensions between participatory processes and socio-cultural and institutional contexts that seldom favour dialogue and more egalitarian methods of discourse (such as in case of the hegemonic nature of judicial and even mental health systems); and tensions within the stakeholder communities, which may include highly heterogeneous groups (as in the case of children and judges), who vary considerably in their values, interests and capacities. Given that these power-related tensions are complex and dynamic, the processes of (research) engagement may be abstruse and confusing (Strumińska-Kutra & Scholl, 2022)—as we described in our roadblocks, particularly those relating to the preference for mono-disciplinarity, community-level, cultural and institutional hegemonies, and the impediments they create for the epistemic participation of child stakeholders, as well as those regarding the researchers’ skills, competencies and psychological readiness to embrace transdisciplinarity.

Addressing these tensions therefore calls for a ‘flexible repertoire of responses’ (Strumińska-Kutra, 2016), as strongly reflected in our methodology. This included enormous amounts of open dialogue and discussion, albeit structured by the use of creative methodologies (such as art, film, games, etc.), in order to stimulate alternative thinking and discourse in relation to children. Specifically acknowledging power dynamics within a given social problem also entails developing a language and tools that make it easier to discuss power, values and interests, both in the research and in policy development (Strumińska-Kutra & Scholl, 2022), particularly in institutional settings that are governed historically and politically by power inequities (Forester et al., 2023). Our engagement with various stakeholders was constantly alert to language and semantics, not only because it entailed direct involvement with children (and the need to find a language and methodology to engage them in court processes), but also with adult stakeholders: for instance, we were conscious of having to demystify medical and psychological jargon and terminology in discussion with judicial personnel, and to make the provisions and concepts of child law more relatable for mental health professionals. Moreover, our creative, non-didactic, empathic and non-judgemental approaches to deploying any methodology enabled us to navigate the frequently rigid and hierarchical spaces, to discuss complex power-related issues, gently shifting adult stakeholder groups towards more child-centred worldviews.

The diverse, layered, non-linear implementation of transdisciplinary methodologies helped us at every stage to identify and consolidate the emerging tensions between child protection, law and mental health in the context of children’s interface with law, including perspectives and viewpoints that conflicted with each other and with our own. In other words, the ‘widening circles’ created by cycles of implementation of various methods with different stakeholders (shown in Fig. 10.1) helped us move towards synthesizing tensions arising from competing demands, as reflected in Herbert Simon’s concept of ‘Design Thinking’ (Simon, 1996, p. 111): ‘everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’. We were then able to channel these tensions back into the interplay between science, law and child mental health in ways that allowed for creation of platforms for (continuing) transdisciplinary dialogues. Such platforms sometimes appeared to take on a life of their own, such as in case of judges, thus moving beyond existing hegemonies within the judiciary; conversely, judicial isolation, leading to weak interaction and conversation among judges, along with having to conform to strict (social) codes of conduct, can result in superficial dialogue (Zimmerman, 2000). Transdisciplinary methodologies allowed for critical exchanges within the judicial stakeholder group, helping them to move beyond their usual restraint and defence of the status quo to reflect on their perceived professional ethos and social role, as well as their varied motivations of social activism and public service (Gomes et al., 2016).

In addition to democracy and epistemic justice, the substantive argument for research and innovation ensuring diversity and inclusion is that the co-production of knowledge by science and society leads to ‘better’ outcomes (Kok et al., 2021); they are outcomes that helping to lead to more practicable solutions to real-world challenges, because of greater integration of multiple stakeholder perspectives, knowledge and values (Lang et al., 2012). By using transdisciplinary methodologies to attempt to shift the underlying power dynamics, and thereby enabling the more powerful groups to perceive issues through a child-centred lens, we were also able to effect policy change—as illustrated by the Supreme Court direction in the Barun Chandra Thakur case on the more child-centred implementation of juvenile transfer laws. We recognize that individual shifts may not always lead to large-scale change, or at least not immediately; but by opening doors to alternative ways of thinking and acting, we have at the very least set the stage for further changes in (adult–child) power dynamics, so that marginalized groups such as children have a voice in systems that make decisions for them—and that there is every possibility that policy and law changes may follow. In relation to outcomes, it is worth highlighting that our work, by assimilating diversity and leading to ‘better outcomes’, also generated new scientific knowledge, based on ‘evidence-based patient information’ approaches (Bunge et al., 2010), and resulting in the development of scientific methodologies for engagement with children in the context of the law.

In conclusion, underpinning our central research question of resolving tensions in the context of children’s interface with the law, by reducing power asymmetries between children and the judicial system, is the issue of inclusion. Transdisciplinary approaches, by transforming underlying power relationships, helped to create a more equitable platform for children’s voices in legal processes. In sum, our work concurs with the TDR literature that discusses the importance of forging collaborations to ensure ‘reciprocity of expertise’ among various stakeholders, and reducing power hierarchies to develop effective research and solutions to complex problems (Kareem et al., 2022).

However, while TDR may begin with wanting to understand and assimilate knowledge from different disciplines and stakeholders, being tossed into the swirling currents of diversity and power is then almost inevitable. Indeed, transdisciplinary researchers may often find themselves in the ‘eye of the storm’—frequently the tensions and dilemmas that are generated by power and diversity. In this storm, our focus was always on children—their rights and best interests continually helped us steer our efforts in favour of the marginalized and powerless.

Finally, while we have endeavoured in this chapter to describe transdisciplinary approaches and methodologies, tensions and challenges and ways forward, perhaps the quintessential experience of transdisciplinary approaches can never be articulated exactly as we would like: the emotions of curiosity, awe and wonder that pervade our initiatives and activities, the excitement of (scientific) discovery in the process of knowledge co-production, the joy of the ‘oneness’ that emerges in deliberations, the new-found empathic bonds created when we (dare to) ‘cross disciplinary boundaries, expand epistemological horizons, transgress stubborn research and education routines and hegemonic powers, and transcend mono-cultural practices in order to create new forms of human activity and new social systems that are more sustainable and socially just’ (Lotz-Sisitka et al., 2015 p. 74).