A political sociology approach to parental authority in European family governance

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Spurred by recent conflicts between parental rights and individual rights related to sex education programs and parental authoritythat have been taken to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), this research analyses the role and effects of Europeaninstitutions on family governance. It conducts an empirical document-based study on European archives concerning family policiesand sexual politics, with an emphasis on case law related to the 8th and 9th articles of the European Convention on Human Rights,and on the 2nd article of Protocol 1 of the Convention. The project has two main objectives, the first is to develop a new theoreticalapproach that can examine the effects of various European institutions' decisions and policies regarding family and parental authorityon the parent-child power relation. The second is to identify the multiple and concrete effects of the studied transformations both onnational and international contexts, in order to summarise the results in a Policy Brief Guideline (PBG) for concerned actors (stateinstitutions, policy makers, parents, and children) in disputed cases on child human rights. These documents bring to light thequestioning of long-standing social hierarchies and distinctions, such as the parental hierarchy with regards to their children, thelegitimation of sexual difference, or the state role to intervene in family policies. The project therefore hypothesises that socialreproduction itself is at stake, in that the self-perpetuation tendency of lifestyles and social relations - such as gender, religion,sexuality, etc.- is at the base of parental concerns in the studied documents. Understanding the core tenets of parent-child powerrelation by revealing the material basis of social discontinuities is an innovative contribution of this project.