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This paper presents a qualitative analysis of front‐line practices regarding emergency removals in Finnish and Irish child protection. It examines how the responses to children's immediate danger are framed by legislation and how front‐line practitioners assess the child's situation and make emergency placement decisions. The data consist of interviews with 16 Irish and 33 Finnish social workers. These child welfare protection systems respond differently to a task that appears to be similar. The Irish team‐based practice rests on the social workers' shared assessment of the child's needs, and the formal decision is made by the courts (or police officers at night‐time); and the Finnish practice involves only one single social worker who makes both the assessment and the removal decision. The Irish system is tightly time regulated, whereas the Finnish system provides a more flexible time frame. Both approaches put a lot of stress on social workers' practice, which also includes creative workarounds (e.g., "planned emergency removals" in Finland). Future research will need to explore these features from the point of view of a child's right to protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child welfare practice is temporally structured and includes a variety of follow-up activities. Practice-based follow-up has not, however, been much explored when studying children's paths in the child welfare system. This paper is based on a study of children (103) who were taken into care in 2006 in 10 Finnish municipalities and their paths in care until 2011. The social workers' institutional knowledge of their 'own' clients comprises the core of the research design. The paper reflects on the nature of this data from the point of view of the notions of temporality. The analysis highlights four temporal trajectories used in retrospective analysis of children's paths in care: the linear time trajectory of the decisions and changes in the institutional positions, the temporally fragmentary trajectory of childhood and youth, the circular time trajectory of professional understanding of the child's path and the silent time trajectory. Each one documents the children's paths differently; the linear one tends to be the 'natural' and most easily available trajectory and consequently, the children's paths are documented via decisions and institutional positions. The analysis suggests that more attention should be given to the complexity of time and temporality when studying children's paths in child welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If children in child protection cannot be cared for by their natural parents, should they be adopted or live in foster home? Results from a study of representative samples of populations (n = 12 330), in eight European countries—Austria, England, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Norway and Spain—and California, USA, reveal that people would recommend adoption over foster care, if a child in public care cannot grow up with their natural parent(s). There are cross‐country differences between populations, and examining if institutional context such as type of child protection system explains differences, we find that child maltreatment‐oriented systems are more supportive of adoption than other types of systems. Citizens having little confidence in the child protection system were only weakly correlated with preference for adoption. In conclusion, people prefer adoption as placement options for children in care are more than foster homes, and possible this finding reflects a sort of refamalialization of children into the private sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vague programme descriptions are known to impede implementation and evaluation. Yet social work change programmes often fail to describe in detail how they aim to provide better outcomes for children and families. This study focused on the Systemic Practice Model (SPM), which is a Finnish adaptation of Reclaiming Social Work, a practice model developed in England. The SPM aims to deliver systemic practice in children's social care and has recently been widely disseminated across Finland. However, research has found both considerable variation in its delivery and a lack of clarity about what it is. This study, applying realist evaluation, aimed to formulate a programme theory based on the perceptions of key informants (n = 12) involved in the national development and dissemination of the SPM during the period 2017–2019. The analysis yielded three core components (a systemic team, systemic weekly meetings, and systemic practice) and two context‐mechanism‐outcome (CMO) configurations, which represent causal chains of the SPM. The findings should enable its quality implementation and meaningful outcome and process evaluation. The findings will also aid organizations and practitioners both to identify changes required in their service provision and prevent adverse effects. This programme theory should be tested and refined with empirical data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recognition of children as rights holders is a true challenge for any policy and practice that involves children, but it is even more so for making decisions about taking children into care. This article departs from the view that when children are perceived as bearers of rights, this should also be reflected in the institutional documents of decision‐making. That is why the documented layer of decisions about taking a child into care is examined here. The empirical data consist of documents of hearings (prehearing and hearing reports) in which children (33) are asked to give their view about a proposed care order and placement in Finland. The documented layers of involving children as rights holders are divided into two types: a minimalist type and a more individualised, thorough and detailed type. The former type represents children as rights holders in a routinised manner, whereas the latter one treats them in a particularised manner: how this particular child in this particular hearing received and gave information and on what grounds her/his view rested. As the documents may have some controversial implications, the recording of children as rights holders should not be treated as an isolated and technical issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens' opinions on child protection public policy are a key dimension of the legitimacy of a political order. We have conducted a survey vignette on a representative sample of citizens ( N = 4,003) in England, Finland, Norway, and California, USA. The findings show that citizens' opinions are clearly in favour of adoption (75%) rather than long-term foster care (25%). Context may partly explain the findings, as the responses of the majority of Anglo-American respondents are in line with practice in their countries but for the Nordic respondents, there is a substantial discrepancy between citizens' opinions and on-going child protection practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Families and social work interventions in their lives are at the core of child welfare. Child welfare practices can shape children's and parents' family memories and narratives of different family relations. However, there is little social work research so far based on the personal narratives of people who have lived in care. The study data consist of the written life stories and biographical interviews of three women who have lived part of their childhood in children's homes. In their narratives, the most central family relation was their relationship to the mother. They used different narrative strategies in their stories while trying to manage both living their childhood in care and presenting their mother morally in the same story. The central moral and emotional stance in the narratives of the mother-daughter relationship was love. Through the analysis, three moral characters of the mother were constructed. The first told about an absent mother, the second a loved and loving mother and in the third, the mother's moral character was continuously negotiated and contested. Constructing a personal story and moral character of oneself and of one's mother can be truly risky in the context of a childhood in care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]