Protecting Children, Creating Citizens

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Križ Katrin. Protecting Children, Creating Citizens

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PROTECTING CHILDREN, CREATING CITIZENS

Participatory Child Protection Practice in Norway and the United States

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In child protection, the power of street-level bureaucrats was evidenced by a research study conducted by Smith and Donovan (2003), who examined how frontline child protection workers in Illinois (US) dealt with the organizational pressures and institutional limitations in their work when reuniting children with families they had been removed from. Almost all the street-level bureaucrats the authors interviewed and observed in court used several strategies to deal with institutional constraints: they focused their energy on the parents they considered most demanding, thus prioritizing and cherry picking one group of parents while ignoring others. They denied the possibility that they could change parental behaviour (and therefore did not attempt to do so), or they attributed the failure of family reunification to the behaviour of individual parents by labelling them as ‘resistant’ (Smith and Donovan, 2003). While these types of behaviours may be functional for the individual street-level bureaucrat and the organization, they create systematic consequences by shaping ‘policy as produced’ (Brodkin, 2012, p 942). This is policy that differs from the original intention of policy makers. Such consequences are problematic because their impact can undermine both the original intent of the policy (Lipsky, 1980) and the legitimacy of the state.

Child protection in Norway and the US

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