Based on the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, which offered a rights-based framework for protection and participation as two key principles in the lives of children, research groups from different disciplines at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel moved from doing research about youngsters at social risk to research with children and adolescents, generating knowledge and insights from their perspectives. Children and youngsters became more and more involved as active research participants whose voices started to lead the development of research and research processes.
To strengthen this rights-based approach in conducting research with children and young people at social risk, the different VUB research groups decided in 2016 to establish collaboration with the aim to expand and integrate their research expertise in an interdisciplinary way. This collaboration resulted in the interdisciplinary research group Voicing Youth at social risk.