5 Resistance and Solidarity against Domestic Violence in Children’s Novel Lola Rose (2003) by Jacqueline Wilson Florence Toh Haw Ching Universiti Putra Malaysia Agnes Liau Wei Lin Universiti Sains Malaysia florence@upm.edu.my Introduction Dame Jacqueline Wilson is a former Children’s Laureate (2005 - 2007) with more than 100 contemporary realistic children’s novels which have been translated into over 30 languages. Drawing from her childhood experiences, Wilson’s works highlight “subjects once seldom discussed in literature aimed at the young but with which children themselves may be familiar either from their own lives or through observing others in the classroom or playground” (Tucker & Gamble, 2001, p. 72). The issues discussed are “seen through the eyes of children who survive, observing and adapting to their complicated lives” (Eccleshare, 2003, para. 1). Despite that, there remains a scarcity in the scholarship devoted to serious analyses of her novels (Armitstead, 2004; Corbett, 2007; Duncan, 2009). The paper responds to this gap by focusing on Wilson’s Lola Rose (2003) with particular attention given to the theme of domestic violence encountered by Lola Rose, the pre-adolescent girl protagonist. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), one of the most worrying global concerns involves the “tremendous violence […] committed against children” (Payton, 2014, para. 5). In the effort to protect the rights of children, UNICEF highlights the “presumably large numbers of children unable or unwilling to report their experiences [as many] victims are too young or too vulnerable to disclose their experience or to protect themselves” (“Children from”, 2016, para. 4). Likewise in Malaysia, the “Welfare Department statistics show that the number of children in need of protection and care following abuse and neglect cases […] has increased”, involving “more female children than male children in reported cases” (Lee, 2016, para. 9-10). As such, although the selected work to analyse in this study is set in England, the issue which the author discusses remains familiar to children across the continents. Methodology Featuring mostly pre-adolescent girl protagonists, Wilson’s works are considered as feminist texts. According to Trites (1997), feminist children’s novels often contain “adults who perpetuate stereotypical gender roles” (p. 6). This is because, the presence of traditionally depicted females could be used to serve as part of the revision (of female ideologies) for it is only against the passive female, the silent female, the objectified female, that the female protagonist’s achievements can be fully understood. [parenthesis original] (p. 6) brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Repository@USM