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

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.