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This article is a critical interrogation of how gender and power figure in Swedish child welfare policy and the discourses on violence in intimate relationships vis-à-vis children exposed to violence. Drawing on feminist violence research, critical childhood studies, and intersectional perspectives, we identify a differentiation with racialised undertones in the understanding of violence as a social problem when related to children’s exposure. While predominately gender-neutral discourses of social heredity and epidemiology run through the material for the seemingly ‘universal’ child, forms of violence ascribed to the presumed cultural Others link to gender, structural power, and sexuality. The article concludes that gendered articulations of violence are restricted yet pivotal if children’s exposure is to be linked to issues of inequality and power. However, when gendering interlinks with racialisation, problematic differentiations of violence, childhoods, and children are produced.

This article offers a rethinking of protection based on synthesised data from Finland and Sweden on children's and mothers' experiences of post-separation stalking, and social workers' case reports on children risking exposure to gender-based violence after separation. Drawing on critical childhood studies and a feminist approach to violence and security, we ask how children's everyday lives can be incorporated in a rethinking of protection for children in post-separation contexts. Departing from identified limitations in protective solutions for children, we propose three ways of rethinking the issue of protection: (1) protection as gender- and power sensitivity, (2) protection as securitising the here and now, and (3) protection as social peace. Our findings call for some changes in professional practices, social policy and legislation.

Using the metaphors body and voice and drawing on critical contributions on biopolitics, this article interrogates children’s participation rights in a knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’. With child welfare and protection practice as an empirical example, I analyse written assessment reports from a Swedish child welfare agency, all exemplifying how social workers evidence needs for protection and reasons for removing children from the home. I discuss how ‘evidencing’ equals a knowledge culture of seeing-believing and predicting-believing and the search for visibly damaged bodies and underdeveloped minds. I furthermore problematise how such conceptualisation of evidencing foregrounds children’s ‘speaking’ bodies while silencing their voices. By showing these manifestations of evidencing, this critical contribution discusses some wider epistemic concerns for fields influenced by the knowledge cultures of ‘the evidence-based’.

This study explores the pivotal role of the body for political recognition and rights claims in child welfare “moral” interventions. I examine how the bodily figures in child welfare assessments, linking these manifestations to the concept of the moral economy of care. A sample of assessment reports from a Swedish municipality, all addressing violations of children’s bodies or integrity, are used as empirical material. I show how the psychosomatically suffering child is being best “heard” as vulnerable. I also argue that such a moral economy of care silences children’s accounts of gendered and racial injustices. Furthermore, racialized moral divides are indicated when assessments of different child bodies are considered. A concluding remark points to a need for a child welfare moral economy of social justice that responds to structural intersecting injustices in childhoods, including to those of a racialized child welfare and its individualized and symptom-oriented services.

Whether on the basis of embodied categories such as race or gender, or through diagnoses and suffering bodies, the body is said to constitute the political battleground for social in- and exclusion. This study is inspired methodologically by moral anthropological approaches and draws on scholarship that foregrounds the pivotal role of the body for political recognition and rights claims in humanitarian and other ‘moral’ interventions. I examine two analytically separated moral economies, the moral economy of care versus justice, as they manifest in child welfare responses to bodily vulnerability. A sample of investigations from a Swedish municipality, all addressing violations of children’s bodies or integrity, are used as empirical material. The article shows the objectified psychosomatically damaged bodies being best ‘heard’ as vulnerable. I argue that in such a moral economy of care, children’s accounts of racial and gendered injustices are silenced. Furthermore, a differentiation in the moralities mobilised when different child bodies are addressed suggests that a version of a moral economy of justice, i.e. a juridical moral response, is being used in unjust ways that reproduce racialized othering while leaving institutional racism without response. While central for a critical social work, equality, social justice and rights issues are downplayed in assessments, and largely lack corresponding welfare measures. A concluding remark is a need of a radical shift within social policy towards structural power perspectives which would not only require a re-thinking of vulnerability but also the role of child welfare itself and its individualised services.

This article is a discursive examination of children's status as knowledgeable moral agents within the Swedish child welfare system and in the widely used assessment framework BBIC. Departing from Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, three discursive positions of children's moral status are identified: amoral, im/moral and dis/loyal. The findings show the undoubtedly moral child as largely missing and children's agency as diminished, deviant or rendered ambiguous. Epistemic injustice applies particularly to disadvantaged children with difficult experiences who run the risk of being othered, or positioned as reproducing or accommodating to the very same social problems they may be victimised by.

Children’s Needs in Focus: A Framework with Children’s Knowledge in Focus? 

There are different frameworks for risk and needs assessment that can be used by social workers in child welfare in encounters with children who are in risk of suffering significant harm. BBIC, which is the Swedish abbreviation for ‘Children’s Needs in Focus’ is widely used in the context of Swedish child protection system. BBIC is a modified version of the Integrated Children’s System from the United Kingdom that has been adapted to Swedish conditions, legislation and practice.

In this presentation, I will give an overview of my PhD project which focuses on BBIC in relation to children who are exposed to violence in intimate relationships. I present a critical analysis of BBIC by mapping out different knowledge cultures; the ‘evidence-based’ scientific knowledge that BBIC is based upon, and some explanation models from the field of violence research and practice. I discuss how particular explanation models about violence in intimate relationships also give different accounts about children and violence. This will be linked to a discussion about what status is granted children’s ‘opinions’ and children as knowledgeable agents in this complex context. Using posters from Operation Kvinnofrid, a campaign against men’s violence against women as an example, I illustrate the knowledges and explanations that are part of the BBIC-frame, as well as those that fall outside. 

This paper discusses the knowledge transmission from the English Integrated Children’s System to Swedish BBIC, ‘Children’s Needs in Focus’, in the light of comparative approaches towards child welfare, contemporary advocacy for cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural approaches, and the emphasis on knowledge-based social work. The focus is on the conceptual framework of risk assessments in the context of the Swedish child protection system. The purpose is to critically assess children’s epistemic position in these complex processes of knowledge distribution. 

Discourse analysis is used as a framework for analysis of evaluations, reports and research linked to BBIC and ICS. With the concept epistemic culture, I look more closely at knowledge production and what is included in the realm of ‘evidence’ and research, as well as what is considered to be knowledge-based social work. Such an approach allows for analyses of epistemic cultures that are not necessarily confined to space and instead are widespread and distributed in line with other logics. 

Preliminary findings indicate how a knowledge transfer serve as a knowledge-legitimizing practice which in many ways exemplifies a homogenization of two geopolitically distinct contexts. From this point of view, BBIC and ICS are tightly interlinked and may be seen as parts of one and the same epistemic culture, similar epistemologies and ontologies of childhood, as well as its epistemic subjects and objects of knowledge. What becomes comparative not only links the two systems’ assumptions of the universal but comparison in itself becomes a legitimizing practice. 

This paper suggests the importance of going beyond conventional comparative welfare approaches and pay more critical attention to epistemic cultures, a fields’ scientific communities, and disciplinary boundaries when trying to understand contemporary social work.

To improve child protection investigations the framework for assessment ”BBIC – Barns Behov I Centrum” [Children’s needs in the centre] was introduced in Sweden just after the new millennium, with the first full training resource published in 2006. There is a lack of research in Sweden about child protection work in cases of intimate partner violence generally and as regards BBIC specifically. However, a number of different sources indicate that there is a need for improvement of the BBIC system when it comes to this group of children at risk. For example, the national inspections of the local authorities’ work with abused women and children exposed to intimate partner violence carried out so far point to serious problems in child protection practice. Since BBIC was introduced the system has been amended and revised several times. A major revision was carried out in 2015. An important question is what these revisions may mean for the handling of cases of intimate partner violence. The aim of the paper is to map and assess how the issue of children’s exposure to violence has been addressed in the different versions of BBIC between 2006 and 2015. Surveying training resources and other documents from the last decade, we outline how there has been a gradual and partial inclusion of the issue of children’s exposure to violence over time, and discuss to what extent these amendments constitute a shift in perspective and emphasis major enough to be likely to impact positively on practice.

Aim

This paper discusses the ‘translation’ of a child welfare assessment model from the English Child Integrated System ICS to a Swedish counterpart, BBIC (abbreviation for Children’s Needs in Focus). The focus is on the discursively produced knowledge on violence in intimate relationships in the context of child welfare assessments.

Background

BBIC is a conceptual risk and needs framework and a modified version of the English ICS that has been adapted to ‘Swedish conditions’, legislation and practice. The study examines this geopolitical ‘translation’ from one system to another looking at how these modifications can be understood in relation to what is often regarded as a cross-cultural phenomenon: (children at risk of) domestic violence. Using the concept of translatability, the paper critically explores the ‘universal’ claims regarding risk, violence and security that remain through the translation process and what knowledge and assumptions that are possible to incorporate, adapt to or even abandon altogether. 

Method

Discourse analysis is used as analytical framework with which evaluations, reports and research linked to BBIC and ICS are analysed.

Findings

The analysis of this research addresses risk assessment approaches in the context of child welfare systems and the prevailing understandings of violence in intimate relationships they generate, as well as those that are open up for contestation when children are in focus of analysis. 

Conclusion

Multifaceted approaches across disciplines, cultures as well as a merging of theory and practice are commonly advocated approaches towards complex social problems. The analysis indicates what is considered to be legitimate evidence-based practice in these contexts and what kind of understandings of domestic violence are generated in the context of child welfare assessments.