Children with no voice: the paradox of children invisibility in the context of home-based interventions
Les enfants invisibles : l'invisibilisation des enfants protégés dans le cadre des interventions renforcées au domicile
Résumé
The French child protection system has undergone significant changes in the last fifteen years. First, a law established in 5 March 2007 has advanced home-based and deinstitutionalized interventions, increasing connections to parents in CPS measures. Less than a decade after this turning point, a new law was passed in 2016 to balance the effects of the previous one and to put children back the at the centre of the child protection system. More recently, the Strategy for Prevention and Child Protection launched in October 2019 went further to encourage the participation of children at all levels.
Home-based interventions have grown quickly and become a viable alternative to institutionalisation. This ethnographic research identifies conditions under which these interventions guarantee the safety of children while meeting their needs at the same time. The study considers institutional factors as well as professional practices. Started in 2017, this work builds upon participant observation of French social workers one week per month from January 2019 to September 2019. Three times per week, social workers visited 6 families and 22 children aged 0 to 14 years old. Settings included the household, a neutral venue, and social work service facilities.
Following Ferguson's (2017) findings, this research highlights the paradox of children invisibility within home-based interventions. While specific tools are made to increase children participation (playing cards, children’s notebooks), they are underused in practice. Most resources are not adapted to gather children’s opinion in this context and are often inaccessible for informal settings, which facilitate children’s expression (Ferguson, 2010). Furthermore, parents tend to capture most of the social workers’ attention. Deinstitutionalised interventions have been designed to address parent’s problems and to develop their parenting skills. If the assessment process focuses on the child safety and the proposed activities include the child, children are only indirectly impacted by these interventions. Moreover, attempts made by children to participate are often silenced (Leeson, 2007). Our findings demonstrate that social workers in these settings are more at risk of habituation that prevent them from identifying warning signs by children (LeBlanc and al., 2012).
In light of the outcomes of this study, we suggest to adapt the assessment tools to the specificity of home-based interventions and to systematically include siblings not under court measures in this process. Additionally, we recommend addressing the risk of habituation by adapting practitioners support and developing dual reference systems and interventions in pairs (i.e., one referent for the child, the other one for parents). Considering the complexity of deinstitutionalized interventions, we advocate for the establishment of independent social worker’s teams to defend the children’s best interests.
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