The supportive relationships that they developed with other detainees and staff, who they referred to as family, were an important mechanism that helped them to cope. ‘When I am in trouble, it is these people I can speak to. The social workers, they are the ones who take good care of us.’10 ‘It is better than being alone in the streets. Here, I am surrounded by my friends and I have made them my family’. (F/16/3:AFG) ‘If somebody is sick, we bring him the food in the room, we make him a tea. Sometimes we help each other’. (M/17/1:EEG) 4.3 Disempowerment The feeling of being disempowered, by systems and by individuals in the system, emerged in many of the responses of the children who participated in the research. A recurring theme was the way in which complicated legal language obscured their understanding of what was happening to them. ‘They mention that article, and that article … They have a law degree, you can imagine. How can we understand?’ (M/15-17/1:EEG) ‘I didn’t understand, because they [judges, defenders, prosecutors] spoke a lot of things. Let’s say that they started to say some articles of the laws of adults and as they were “embolataban”, so you do not know those laws, then you are lost.’ (MF/17-20/1:LAC) ‘No not really they used big words that I didn’t understand’. (M/16/1:WEOG) ‘In a court decision judges asked our views and they also told us that we should tell the truth and everything that happened and we know, but at the end they call us liars, so we think our opinions are not important in formal meetings’. (M/13-17/1:APG) 10 Statement of a child during a consultation in Burkina Faso (code AFG for Africa Group). 107