Protecting Children, Creating Citizens. Križ, Katrin
A few years ago, I had the privilege of working on a research project with Dakota Roundtree-Swain, then an undergraduate student at the college where I work. We examined the recollections of young adults who had been in out-of-home care about their experiences with participating in decision-making while in care. The study participants talked about their removal from family, placement in care, and parental visitations (Križ and Roundtree-Swain, 2017). Joseph,1 an African-American young man who was pursuing a college degree at the time of the interview, said that when he was 12, he had called the local public child protection agency and reported being abused by his mother. He was subsequently placed in a foster home. Joseph described several situations when his opinion had not been heard by his child protection caseworkers. For example, the child protection agency wanted to reunite Joseph with his mother when he was 14. Joseph did not want to live with his mother, though, and told his case workers so, but he was returned to her anyway. He felt that the workers did not take his wish seriously because of his age:
I was younger, I was 14, so I think it was really hard for [the child protection agency] to accept and notice that someone as young as I was could be insightful enough to see what was happening and to realize that … the kid wasn’t just feeling hate or just complaining, and to realize that they were in a toxic situation and needed to get out of it. (Križ and Roundtree-Swain, 2017, pp 37–8)
Joseph thought that the caseworkers perceived him as a problem that needed fixing. He described the child protection system as a factory treating children in care as objects that are produced in an automated, identical fashion, as if on an assembly line. He explained: ‘I’ve always looked at foster care as a factory: … we are merchandise on this conveyor belt’ (Križ and Roundtree-Swain, 2017, p 32).
Joseph’s powerful words about his experiences in care were the motivation to write this book. Dakota’s and my project showed that the study participants’ experiences with participation in child protection-related processes varied widely. Joseph and the other young people Dakota interviewed remembered few situations when they had choices and could participate in decisions and many when they could not. They believed that children should receive information from their case workers so they know what is going on and can develop an opinion about their situation. They thought that children’s opinions should be heard and given weight in decision-making processes. (I use the term ‘children’ to describe all children under the age of 18, including adolescents and younger children. I sometimes specifically refer to children between the ages of 12 and 18 years as ‘adolescents’, ‘youth’ or ‘young people’.)
Goal and argument
This book aims to show in what ways child protection caseworkers employed by public child protection agencies in Norway and the US (California2) can create citizens by promoting the participation of children and young people like Joseph in their everyday practice. There is ample evidence about how professionals working in child protection systems discourage children’s and young people’s participation, as I will show in Chapter 2. My goal in writing this book was to highlight the participatory work that child protection workers undertake to promote children’s citizenship while protecting them from harm.
I wanted to study whether and how children’s ‘substantive citizenship’ (Glenn, 2010), their full inclusion into their community through participation, is accomplished in the interactions with professionals in child protection settings. I took this micro sociological, symbolic and interactionist approach to the study of child protection systems not to deflect from the arguments about systemic racial, ethnic and class oppression of children, youth and families who come into contact with child protection systems (see, for example, Roberts, 2002; 2008; Roberts and Sangoi, 2018), but because I was curious about what happens inside the system from the viewpoint of child protection caseworkers. I leaned on the symbolic interactionist tradition in sociology (Goffman, 1959) and especially the work of West and Zimmerman (1987) to show in what ways child protection workers ‘do participation’, that is how they promote children’s participation in interactions with them.
Following the symbolic interactionist paradigm, citizens are understood here as individuals who are recognized as active participants both by those they interact with and by wider society, for example through legislation and public policy. My understanding of children’s and young people’s citizenship was inspired by an article on citizenship by Sherry Arnstein. Arnstein (1969, p 216) defined citizenship as ‘a categorical term for citizen power. It is the redistribution of power that enables the have-not citizens, presently excluded from the political and economic processes, to be deliberately included in the future.’ By my definition, ‘citizens’ are individuals who have the opportunity to participate in decisions that affect their own lives and the lives of their families and communities. They may exercise their power as citizens through participation in elections, engaging in community activism or membership in associations. They may also exercise their power through participation in everyday decisions in the family, at school, at workplaces and in interaction with state bureaucracies, such as the public child protection system.
Public child protection agencies are only one part of the citizenship piece, but they are a salient one in the lives of children and young people who encounter them. Child protection caseworkers, the ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 1980) working in public child protection agencies, make very important decisions about children and young people’s lives and provide children, youth and families with pertinent services. Children and youth must be able to participate in administrative decisions, according to the international standards set by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). As Joseph’s example shows, street-level bureaucrats like child protection caseworkers have the power to create the conditions for children’s and young people’s participation. They can thus shape children and young people’s opportunities to act as citizens. The aim of this book was to examine whether and how child protection caseworkers in Norway and the US help promote children’s and young people’s status as citizens by fostering participation.
I focused on child protection caseworkers’ views of and practice with children and the organizational context in which these practices occur. Previous research on children’s involvement in child protection-related processes has shown that it is important to consider organizational factors, such as the procedures employed by a child protection agency, to understand the degree to which children’s and young people’s participation occurs in child protection (see, for example, Vis et al, 2012; Vis and Fossum, 2013, and Vis and Fossum, 2015). I argue that, despite organizational and policy differences, child protection caseworkers in Norway and the US practise a participatory approach that promotes children’s and young people’s status as citizens. I demonstrate in what ways children and young people like Joseph can be empowered in their interactions with child protection caseworkers in child protection investigations and during service provision after removal from home. I will show how child protection caseworkers inform children and young people and encourage them to develop and express their own opinions.
I show that even in the context of a system characterized by unequal power relations between children and adults, a participatory practice approach is apparent. It is impossible to say how prevalent this participatory approach is across Norway and the US because my argument rests on a very small sample of study participants. My findings therefore cannot be generalized to other parts of Norway and the US, let alone the countries overall. However, my research suggests that the everyday interactions of child protection workers can be at the forefront of emancipatory practices – practices that allow children to be citizens as a result of interactions with adults. This is perhaps not surprising given the existence of theory and practice models in social work that focus on empowering, collaborative and client-centred anti-racist social work practice (Dominelli, 2018; Granosik et al, 2019).
I primarily drew on in-depth interviews with 28 experienced frontline child protection workers3 employed by public child protection agencies in Norway and 40 workers in the state of California in the US. (More details on my sample, methods of data collection and analysis, and study limitations can be found in Appendix 1.) As the street-level bureaucrats working on the front lines of child protection policy, child protection caseworkers are in a unique position to provide pertinent evidence on the topic of children’s