Children and Young People Are Oppressed — Here’s How I’m Working to Change That

This month, we’re thrilled to feature a piece from Siza Dube, a consultant, researcher, and activist who works at the intersections of Black feminisms, reproductive justice and community activism, centring minoritised communities and young people. Siza has been collaborating with Design for Social Impact as a communications specialist as well as a guest speaker on several of our Research Design for Social Impact courses. In this piece, she shares her journey and vision for how children and young people—too often treated as marginal voices—can be centred in movements for justice.

For most of my life, children and young people have been at the centre of my world and the heart of my community, even though I have not birthed any children and I am not traditionally a mother or parent in the ways we are socialised to think about.

For years, as a volunteer, I spent every week in schools, babysitting, planning activities for teenagers, children, and young people at various community locations, mentoring, running summer camps, and everything in between.

I have been the point of call for emergencies, done my fair share of last-minute school runs, attended school sports days, and acted as an alternative to extremely expensive childcare over the summer holidays when parents and caregivers found themselves in a bind.

These experiences with parents, caregivers, children, and young people have given me immense compassion for those who care for children and young people. I have observed that those who do so often have very little support. I have seen first-hand the obstacles the state and society put in the way of caregivers, constantly impeding not only their right to parent but to parent their children in safe and healthy environments.

Above all, these experiences have solidified my view that children and young people are an oppressed group and that they too are minoritised—something I feel is rarely discussed.

Yet we see, first-hand, how children and young people in Gaza, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan are being erased, living amidst genocide, poverty, warfare, and violent regimes.

We also see, in the very places we live, how children and young people in the UK are forced to navigate poverty of all kinds, political uncertainties, educational inequalities, racism, and a lack of mental health support.

This list barely covers the ways in which children and young people are minoritised and oppressed in society at large, not to mention how intersectionalities such as class, race, gender, and sexuality can exacerbate the ways they experience these structures of oppression.

Black Feminisms and Reimagining the World

In my doctoral research, I explore how Black women in the UK have historically organised around welfare inequalities and reproductive rights.

I rely on two frameworks or ways of understanding: Black feminism and Reproductive Justice.

There is a clear difference between Black feminism and Black feminist thought. The latter was clearly laid out by Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins in her seminal text Black Feminist Thought. 

• Black feminist thought is primarily a theoretical framework concerned with understanding and critically analysing, including historicising, the experiences of Black women—particularly how race, gender, class, sexuality, and other systems of oppression intersect in our lives. 
• Black feminism is more focused on using this understanding as a foundation for activism and for reimagining and working towards liberatory futures.

As an academic activist, I operate somewhere in the middle.

When working with young people, I prefer to say “Black feminisms” to emphasise that Black women’s experiences, analyses, activism, and contributions are not monolithic, and to incorporate both the theoretical framework and the activism—both present and past.

Reproductive Justice, on the other hand, can be understood, as Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger outline in Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, as:

• The right not to parent
  
• The right to parent
  
• The right to parent in safe and healthy environments
  
  

A personal note on Black feminisms: I have found much solace in it, especially as I try not only to make sense of the world but also my place in it and how I hope to make it better.

In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins writes that “Black feminist thought ... equip(s) people to resist oppression and ... inspire(s) them to do it” (p.19). That is true for me and for the young people I have shared my research with.

For practitioners, these frameworks aren’t just theory, they can shape how we design programmes, policies, and even everyday youth work. They ask: whose voices are centred? Whose choices are respected? And what systems do we need to dismantle for children and young people to thrive?

My Work with Young People

Over 18 months ago, I was volunteering weekly on Wednesdays at one of my local schools in London. I loved it. We had a lively bunch of Year 10 students, and each week after school we spent hours catching up and doing activities, some very silly and fun, like creating a horror movie from scratch—pretty much anything the young people wanted to do.

Each week, one of the mentors would have 30 to 40 minutes to prepare a presentation to share with the young people about their work. Eventually, it was my turn, and I thought, “Wait, what do I do again, and how can I make this something that will have a lasting impact on them?”

I created a mini workshop for young people, focusing on key themes of Black feminisms such as intersectionality, positionality, centring minoritised voices, and activism. I shared short case studies from my archival research at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, highlighting Black women activists in the UK organising around welfare inequalities—from education to housing, healthcare, and reproductive rights. The session then tasked young people, in groups, to reimagine the world by identifying an inequality they wanted to address and developing solutions using the key themes of Black feminisms.

During that session, the young people discussed improving access to free school meals, poverty, wealth redistribution, gender discrimination in the workplace, racism, and much more.

And that is how my Reimagining the World with Black Feminisms project was born.

It has since evolved into so much more: assemblies, lectures, mentoring sessions, and workshops ranging from one to four hours with young people.

Youth Voice in Action

I have worked with three schools and reached over 1,000 children and young people aged 11–18.

By bringing stories of Black women activists from the archives into classrooms, my work bridges the gap between historical knowledge and present-day struggles. 

Here is what some of the children and young people have learned or expressed along the way: 

• “That women are the fastest growing prison population”
  
• “Discrimination can happen at any job”
  
• “That Black women are four times more likely to die from giving birth”
  
• “That Black women were sterilised without their permission in the past”
  
• “I won’t give up”
• “I have a deeper understanding of Black feminism”
  
• “To be kind”
• “It impacted me socially”
• “I learned more about myself and my ancestors before me”

These examples show that for young people, theory is not abstract; it’s a resource for action.

Why This Matters for Those of Us Concerned with Social Justice

For anyone thinking about how they would like to contribute not just to the world, but to their own world and the communities they love the most, remind yourself, as I do every single day, that an urgent desire to change the world and dismantle structures of oppression—even if for just one person, one community, one group—will always outweigh feelings of overwhelm, inadequacy, anxiety, or helplessness.

It would be a lie to say that this is easy, or that it happens every day, or that I never experience overwhelm, helplessness, anxiety, or inadequacy because of the state of the world we live in. It is something you have to fight for and preserve.

But for me, something just clicks when I am doing this work for and with young people, who are and have always been at the core of my community, who I believe deserve a better world.

This work also shows what happens when knowledge from the archives is carried into classrooms and communities. This is research as praxis, where theory fuels action.

As practitioners, we can ask ourselves:

• How can we use the research and data we hold not just to measure, but to mobilise?
  
• Are we letting our own data and research sit passively in reports?
  
• What would it look like to share those insights directly with the communities most impacted?
  
• How can we turn our learning into tools for mobilisation, not just monitoring?

If you’d like to work with me or learn more about my work with young people please email me at [email protected]  or connect with me on LinkedIn. 

At Design for Social Impact, we’re proud to collaborate with educators, researchers and activists like Siza to reimagine heart-felt social impact. You can hear more about Siza’s work in our upcoming Research Design for Social Impact course, starting on September 12th 2025. Click here to learn more and register, we have 20 funded places for UK-based volunteers and practitioners from global majority and historically underserved groups. Not from these groups but interested in taking part? Click here