5 - Doing Participation

Summary

This chapter analyzes when and how child protection caseworkers reported doing participation in their everyday practice. The term ‘doing participation’ refers to the range of possible participation, from minimal participation by listening to a child's opinions and reflections without taking them into consideration to promoting genuine participation in decision-making. The chapter examines to what degree the study participants facilitated genuine participation, defined as children's opinions being heard and weighed in decision-making. The decisions study participants discussed included the removal of children from home, support services, foster care placements and children's contact with their parent(s) while in care. The data for this chapter rest on the responses to the following interview questions answered by 28 child protection workers in Norway (N) and 40 workers in California (C). The first question was: “At what stage in a case do you involve children?” This question was often followed up by, “How do you involve children?” and “If your opinion differed from what should happen in a case with that of the child, how do you proceed?” The first two questions yielded information about what workers said they did when they involved children in the child protection cases they typically worked on. The third question provided data on the kinds of decisions in which they tended to disagree with children. It offered evidence on how workers weighed a child's opinion in a situation in which the child disagreed with them.

I used definitions of participation by Shier (2001), Thomas (2002) and Lansdown (2010) to assess the levels of children's participation that workers reported promoting. One of the bricks in Thomas's (2002) ‘climbing wall’ of participation is the support the child experiences in expressing their opinions and wishes. Another is the voice of the child in decision-making (Thomas, 2002). These are the five levels of empowerment distinguished by Shier: ‘1. Children are listened to. 2. Children are supported in expressing their views. 3. Children's views are taken into account.