About Deborah Parkes

Deborah Parkes is a social worker and clinical counsellor, a former journalist, and since 2019 a PhD candidate in the University of Ottawa’s School of International Development and Global Studies. Her research interests include child maltreatment, children’s rights, and the role that poverty and structural oppression play in people’s lives, including in their personality development. Her PhD research examines the contexts and processes by which children in Asia are entrusted to Buddhist monasteries to live as child monks and how practices fit with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It draws on Sen’s concept of justice as the ability to choose for oneself the kind of life one would like to live, paying attention to the role of poverty in why children are entrusted to monasteries in many cases.