Background to the Research

• A growing body of literature emphasises the active agency of children in managing and negotiating their own time and space. Part of this focus involves the recognition that children's perceptions of geographical space may differ from that of adults. Children who grow up in territorial neighbourhoods often use certain signals and markers to label insiders and outsiders; in NI, this knowledge is very subtle, given the absence of visual cues to determine who is a Catholic and who is a Protestant. The purpose of this article was to examine how teenagers recount narratives that maintain, reinforce and at times challenge sectarian boundaries.
  

Research Approach

• The research drew on focus-group discussions with 80 teenagers aged 14-15 years from four schools in North Belfast. All the teenagers were from working-class backgrounds and the schools represent the main educational provision for working-class children in the area.
  

Main Findings

• The children's narratives were often characterized by fear and mistrust of the 'other'.
• Children from both communities drew on narratives which illustrated generational otherness in their communities. Both groups spoke of the uneasy relationships between them and the adults in their respective communities, recounting how adults constructed a number of internal boundaries in attempts to control young people's access to public space.
• Children's understanding of the terms Catholic and Protestant were not limited to religious differences but extended to recognition that each group had different long-term political aspirations. This politics of difference permeated children's conceptions of 'us' and 'them'.
• Boundaries were built through the recounting of narratives drawing on supposed essentialist differences between the two groups. In this way, boundaries were expressed in relation to a vague set of characteristics supposedly held by each group. Each side held an imaginative geography of the other's space and these imaginations were given substance through the demarcation of bounded territory.
• Each group defined themselves in terms of a number of positive traits that were deemed absent in the other group. Some children suggested that these differences were biologically rooted, leading to predetermined differences in innate ability and nature. Both groups produced narratives which illustrated each group's attempt to claim the moral high ground.
• In many of the narratives produced by the children, there was evidence that some of them were drawing on taken-for-granted categorizations and identifications based on 'us' and 'them'. A positive 'us' was defined in relation to a negative 'them' and bounded spaces were identified as 'sites of absence' because they lacked the constructive characteristics that each community attributed to their own enclosed social space.
• Many children actively participated in marking their territory, particularly through the use of graffiti and slogans proclaiming British or Irish identity or displaying support for paramilitaries.
• In relation to bolstering boundaries, narratives continued to reflect attitudes of prejudice, but the difference was expressed in terms of perceived material differences. Both groups produced narratives reflecting social distance and a lack of empathy with peers from the 'other side'.
• Each side was aware of the powerful role of the media in portraying conflict situations and the extent to which victimhood can be utilised to gain sympathy for each group's political aims. These feelings were much more intensely held by Protestant teenagers who felt that the media was generally more sympathetic to Catholics in NI and that Catholics were more experienced in using the media to their political advantage.
• The narratives produced by teenagers were similar to earlier work on Israeli and Palestinian identities whereby asserting one's group identity could only be achieved through negating the identity of the other.
• Teenagers often moved around in groups to enhance feelings of safety and dressed in ways that identified them with one group rather than the other. These various mechanisms often led to the hardening of boundaries between the two groups.
• In many instances children produced messier and contradictory identity categories than ones based simply on sectarianism.
• Children from both communities tended to keep to their own area and rarely crossed into neighbouring territory. However, they occupied shared spaces in the city centre of Belfast, although here they often evaluated the outer appearance of peers such as type of clothes or jewellery as markers of religious identification. Nonetheless, some children were aware that their experience of the 'other' was limited and potentially distorted by negative encounters in their respective areas of residence, but that these experiences may not apply to the 'general other'.
• Boundaries and identities were not fixed and static; for example, there was a perception that sectarian attitudes were linked to class, while a minority of children had relatives from the 'other' religious group due to cross-community marriage.
• There was some evidence that children who had participated in cross-community contact schemes held more favourable images of each other. However, some teenagers recounted incidents whereby cross-community contact endorsed rather than challenged taken-for-granted views.
• Sometimes groups occupied shared spaces such as shopping malls or cinemas. At times, such locations were sites of conflict but, on occasions, other teenage interests such as music, dress (Goths) or sport (skate-boarding) overrode sectarian identities.
  

Conclusions

• Within such a highly contested space as North Belfast, it is unsurprising that teenagers produce narratives concerning in-group and out-group formations. However, they also produce messier constructions of space reflecting contradictory relationships to the surrounding environment. This study challenges simplistic accounts of sectarian attitudes as pre-determined and static. As active agents, teenagers are not empty vessels into which existing adult prejudices are poured. Rather, they may accept, resist and transform the dominant messages they receive throughout their transition from childhood to adulthood. Like adults, children continually and actively negotiate and make sense of their own social realities. While a key feature of the data was the importance children placed on building and bolstering boundaries, they were also concerned with bridging sectarian boundaries.