Participation in the Child Protection Assessment: Voices from Children in Estonia
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Participation in the Child Protection Assessment: Voices from Children in Estonia Kadi Lauri1,2 · Karmen Toros1 · Rafaela Lehtme1 Accepted: 4 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This article explores children’s views and experiences of participation within the context of child protection assessment practice. The findings of this study enable child protection workers as well as other professionals to learn from children, what is needed to better engage children to participate in matters affecting them. A small-scale study included 14 children registered as children in need of assistance in child protective services from one region in Estonia through in-depth semistructured interviews. Findings indicate that children’s experiences and memories of their first contact with the child protection worker varied extensively. Some of the children had no experience talking to a child protection worker personally, meaning their voices were not expressed, heard, or considered in the decision-making process. Communication was lacking in the dialogue, and no deep conversations about family life, interventions, children’s needs, wishes, or hopes were reported. A lack of communication tended to be mainly part of younger children’s experiences. Based on models of children’s participation from the literature, contextual elements are proposed to enhance the active child participation process in child protection—child-centredness and inclusiveness. Implications for practice and future research are discussed with a focus on meaningful child participation. Keywords Participation · Children’s voices · Child protection · Engagement · Child-centred practice · Estonia Children must have a voice in matters that concern them. This understanding stems from the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC; Art 12.1), which states that children have the right to express their views. The CRC embodies a view of children as competent actors who are carriers of their own rights, as Heimer, Näsman, and Palme (2016) highlighted. Therefore, children and young people are believed to play a fundamental role in the planning and delivery of services (Muench, Diaz, & Wright, 2017). Aadnanes and Gulbrandsen (2017) argued that ‘social work theory and practice should include children’s own perspectives on such experiences, to accommodate the practice guiding principle * Karmen Toros [email protected] Kadi Lauri [email protected] Rafaela Lehtme [email protected] 1
Tallinn University, Narva mnt 25, 10120 Tallinn, Estonia
Social Insurance Board, Endla 8, 15092 Tallinn, Estonia
2
of person-in-environment’ (p. 595). This complies with Archard and Skivenes’ (2009) view that a child’s participation is a way of securing information or evidence that facilitates the making of a decision and its subsequent implementation. Involving children is considered to improve the quality of decision-making because they possess information about their own needs and interests (Enroos, Helland, Pösö,
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