[RNLD] Video of children and permissions

[Simon Musgrave]

Dear RNLDers,

In preparing an ethics application with a student, some questions have come
up about who can or should decide about access to recordings (in this case
video recordings) of children.

I think we all accept that parents/guardians can give permission for
children to participate in research, but is it appropriate for such people
to make a decision about whether resulting recordings might be publicly
accessible in an archive?

My current position is that parents can give consent for video recordings
of their children to be made, but that they do not have the right to give
consent for such recordings to be publicly exposed. I think that only the
people recorded can give that permission and that for that permission to be
meaningful, it has to be given by an adult. The consequence is that no
video of a child can be publicly exposed before a] the child has grown up
and is able to give informed consent; and such consent has been given, or
b) enough time has passed that the (then) child can safely be assumed to be
no longer living.

The possible scenarios under a) are that the community continue to use the
materials which have been recorded in a project and as children reach
adulthood they want access to their recordings (for the use of the whole
community at least) and they approach the archive to alter the access
conditions; or researchers approach the archive wanting to view material
and then have to seek relevant permissions themselves.

I realise that this may seem a rather extreme position, but I feel
uncomfortable with the idea that a decision might be made on behalf of
someone else which that someone else (the child) might not be happy about
later. And that it is ethically preferable to impose a restriction that can
be relaxed by the affected person rather than that person having to act to
impose a restriction to remedy an undesirable situation.

I am interested to know other people's thoughts about this.

(And I'm certainly open to a charge of hypocrisy - I have posted pictures
of my children on Facebook.)

Best, Simon

-- 
Simon Musgrave
Lecturer
Co-ordinator, Undergraduate Major in
Linguistics<http://www.monash.edu.au/pubs/handbooks/aos/linguistics/ug-arts-linguistics.html>
School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics
Monash University
Victoria 3800
Australia

Simon.Musgrave at monash.edu
+61 (0)3 9905 8234+61 (0)3 9905 8234 (phone)
+61 (0)3 9905-5437 (fax)
Official page:
http://profiles.arts.monash.edu.au/simon-musgrave/<http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/linguistics/staff/smusgrave.php>


<http://users.monash.edu.au/~smusgrav/index.html>


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