tomorrow the whole family will be there. I don’t get it, if they’ve had
prob-lems, you don’t have to dump it all on others.” (girl 17)
In the interview quoted above, the adolescent describes her childhood in a family ter-rorised by an abusive father. She has several brothers, all of whom had behavioural problems in childhood. The mother was often physically abused by the father, and the family’s life was dominated by uncertainty and having to move house frequently. The adolescent describes herself as a shy and quiet girl who often withdrew into her room in the family’s difficult situations. Hurtig (2006, 169) describes how, when helping families with children, there is often an expectation that all the family members would be helped simultaneously. However, there is no clear picture of the family’s situati-on. Views concerning the needs and problems of each family member are difficult to formulate, and even conflicting views may exist. Work with families of immigrant background may thus easily focus on family-oriented efforts.
In the excerpt above, it is easy to see how the support work was provided based on assumptions of the child’s strong ties to the family. The child was seen primarily as a member of her family and through the relationships in the family. Support work was characterised by viewing issues through the lens of the family unit and from the perspective of the adults’ needs and dilemmas. Helping the children was thought to happen through helping adults (Hurtig 2003; 2006). It is also possible to identify in this interview a set of ideas through which adults interpreted the need for support, a kind of ’framework of endurance’ (Hurtig 2006, 170-171). The child is assumed to endure and tolerate the stress caused by crisis situations, even severe ones.
“sometimes I met them (workers from the child protection institution) on my own, too. But usually we had family therapy. At one stage there was my dad, mum and all the family members. I don’t remember them exactly, I suppose they were helpful, and then sometimes we just shouted there at each other and at the workers. It (family therapy) didn’t work out at all at one point, and then it wasn’t done at all at one point.” (boy 14 y)
The ’percolation support model’ is the name given to a type of child protection work where the child is met indirectly through the parents (Hurtig 2003; 2006). From the child’s viewpoint the model is problematic, since the child is not helped directly, but only through the parents. The basic premise is that if the parents are doing well, the child also does well. The focus of the work is thus on fixing the situation of one or both parents, not on a model of support based on the child’s needs. Ojaniemi and Rantajärvi (2010, 234) claim that before the new Child Protection Act came into force, the initial assessment in child protection was carried out following the ’percolation support model’. Although the child was physically present at the social bureau or du-ring the home visit, he or she was not seen as an individual with rights or as an active agent equal to the parent.
A child’s inclusion is challenging for child protection because of the knowledge the child possesses. How should the knowledge of a child or adolescent of immigrant background be handled, especially when it is collected in the parents’ absence?
Should a child’s knowledge be assessed from the viewpoint of assessing its reliabi-lity? Should the basic assumption be that immigrant children and adolescents are especially loyal to their parents? The ’loyalty framework’ (Hurtig 2006, 171) brings
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into child protection work the assumption that children do not like to tell outsiders about the family’s internal affairs, but will protect the family at the expense of their own well-being. When working with families of immigrant origin, workers may tend to add on top of the ’loyalty’ view the ’consequence framework’ (Hurtig, 171). This involves the idea that a child who tells outsiders about the family issues is at risk of being punished in the family.
“yeah they (social workers and family workers) were afraid of dad. They didn’t dare to ask about anything in front of him (father), they (workers) pretended to be cheerful, although they (workers) were mad about how so-meone can do that to his own child, d’ya know.” (boy 18 y)
In the data excerpt above, the adolescent describes actions the social workers took to support his family. As the adolescent sees it, the workers were afraid of the father, but tried to hide their fear by “pretending to be cheerful” when they met the father. The adolescent saw, however, what their real attitude was. The excerpt brings to mind a kind of a theatrical play with roles being played by the social workers and the father.
The adolescent was, in a way, an outsider who could see the situation as a whole, and perceive how absurd it was.
P
arents’ experiences of institutional care servicesIn child protection practice, placing a child in custody is the last-resort means of securing the child’s growth and development. It is a procedure that strongly interferes with the child’s constitutional rights and the family’s autonomy. Therefore, it is a legal rights issue for all the parties involved: the child, the family and the workers. Forced custody and institutional or foster care are only used if the circumstances at the family home or the child’s own behaviour pose a serious risk to the child’s health and deve-lopment. In addition, arranging forced custody and care services can only be initiated if community-based child protection services support measures have not been pos-sible or suitable, or if they have proven to be insufficient. An assessment must also be made to determine if institutional or foster care is in the child’s best interest (Child Protection Act 2007/417/40§).
The interview data shows that the parents’ perceptions of how well institutional care served their children were linked to their own ability to adapt to the child no longer living at home. The road to acceptance had been extremely hard and it had taken a long time. Siitonen (1999, 117) discusses empowerment as a personal process that is connected to the individual’s own will and ability to set goals, as well as perception of oneself and trust in one’s chances. Furthermore, it involves unwavering respon-sibility regarding one’s personal development, and ability and will to act in a way one knows to be right. To support empowerment, it is important to offer encouraging feedback and reflective, supportive interaction. Among the interviewees, those who were able to see their child’s best interest and see that the child was receiving expert professional care were the ones who had set as their goal that the forced custody should be terminated, and that the child should return home at some point.
In the following excerpt, a father describes his preconceptions of the Finnish child protection system, especially the process of placing a child in custody. However, the important thing is how his preconceptions change through his interaction with a social worker.
“my initial impression was negative, I must admit. The initial stage went so that I heard a lot about forced custody, and custody as a word was hard for me to understand, and like I said it’s about attitude and it did upset me since because I thought that if a child is placed in custody then the child is taken away from the family altogether. And this is why I say there should be a lot of attitude change. I had many discussions. As soon as I heard about the custody, I said that I don’t know anything about this and could we dis-cuss what it’s about. I had disdis-cussions at the social bureau with the social worker. After this I understood and I have been keeping an open mind. It is important to me that the child gets support and care, nothing else matters.”
(father 1)
The data excerpt describes how the reciprocal discussion between the father and the social worker leads, with time, to the father gaining self-understanding. He has been included in processing matters, and he has received information about them. A sig-nificant factor is the father’s active role and subject status, in demanding and asking for discussions himself. At the same time, the social worker has given him space to ask over and over again, and to demand explanations. The control involved in child protection work has changed into support.
Juhila (2006, 254) describes cultural discourses, meaning widely known and sha-red ways of structuring issues and situations, and attaching meaning to them. Since social work is not an island apart from the rest of the world, workers will inevitably operate with these types of cultural discourses or cultural scripts and associated expectations. In the data excerpt, the father discusses his own cultural expectations and what child protection work meant to him. In terms of the child’s best interest being considered, the most crucial fact is that the father’s view of child protection changed in a direction where the child alone is central. In the open dialogue between the father and the social worker, the father reached a new understanding of child protection and the child’s best interest.
In a discussion where the participants come from different countries, different cultu-rally created scripts meet, as well as people. I define a cultucultu-rally created script as a map which is shaped from the prevailing forms of knowing, built at various times and in various ways in different cultures. Each culture has scripts regarding how to act and proceed in certain situations. A client of immigrant origin cannot necessarily rely on a Finnish social worker’s cultural process of attaching meaning to provide him or her with the means to understand the story that is being told. Questions that are felt to be difficult or complex may be actively avoided on both sides by escaping behind the idea of the fundamental nature of cultural difference (Katisko 2011, 59).
The interviews show that if a positive and respectful discourse has been formed
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between parents and workers during community care services, it is much easier to form a positive, interactive relationship with the staff at the child protection institution.
“here (in institutional care) the child is helped to calm down. (A ward at the children’s home) has the task of helping the child to calm down, nothing more, there is no more to their task than that. The parents’ task is here, as the calming down is happening, to help with the child upbringing. Because being here (at the institution) should not end parenting. It should be preci-sely the reason and motivator, that now I have the support that will help with the part which I have no skill to handle. But this role of parenting and child-rearing is my own role, because I am that child’s parent and a lot of work has to be put into that.” (father 1)
The father wants to stress that the child being taken into custody does not end his role as parent and father. He wants to be present in his son’s daily life and to convey his own cultural background by reading and having conversations. The father sees the role of institutional care as a form of support for him in his childrearing. His dream is to get his son out of the institution in the future, to live with the family again. The conditions that allow a positive interaction between father and institutional staff have been built on mutual respect and appreciation.
Among the interviewees there were some who feared that their child who had been placed in custody would forget his or her native language and the parents’ culture.
There were also parents represented in the interview data who cannot accept their child being placed in custody. For these parents, committing to working in cooperati-on with the child protecticooperati-on instituticooperati-on had been very hard.
The critical attitude towards institutional care dates back to a time before the forced custody decision: