‘Young’ adolescents, defined for this paper as those aged 10 to 14 years or enrolled in School-years Six to Ten, are going through a period of significant change in their lives that is unique to their age group, but from a policy perspective it may be that this has insufficient recognition.  This paper investigates the ‘official’ rights of young adolescents and analyses existing quantitative and qualitative data to develop a profile of young adolescents in New Zealand.
The investigation found that depending on their age and maturity young adolescents do have ‘official’ rights to be heard as individuals and as a group on matters that affect them; and found evidence from qualitative research that they can be perceptive about the needs of others. 
The section of the profile based on administrative data is biased towards young adolescents who are ‘at risk’ and is influenced by much of the data being a count of events (for example, school suspensions) rather than people.  As there may be more than one event associated with the one person, in many cases the exact number of young adolescents involved was not identified.  The data gave clear indications that the number of ‘at risk’ events increases as the age of the young adolescents increases and that in nearly every instance, there are significantly more ‘at risk’ events involving boys and at a younger age, compared with events involving girls.
This is an edited version of a research paper completed in 2005 for the degree Master of Public Policy.  Citations of the law, government policies and research projects give the situation as at 2005.  The latest data cited are for the year 2004.