How has the child protection service system supported/served the fami- fami-lies (in the experience of children/adolescents and parents)?

The study is based on interviews with seven parents and six children of immigrant background. The interviews were carried out in the spring of 2012. The interviewees were selected from the clients of a child protection institution in cooperation with the workers of the institution. To begin, the staff had discussions with the interviewees, describing the research to them and asking permission to give me their contact in-formation. Information regarding the research, the theme interview questions, and a letter of consent regarding interviews with the children were translated to the native language of each interviewee. This was done to ensure that each participant under-stood the purpose of the research.

It was not easy to motivate parents to participate in the study. This is understandable, since most of them did not wish to share with an outsider the difficult life events sur-rounding their children’s placement in custody. In addition, they brought up the fact that they had had to tell their story to so many officials that they were tired of sharing information about their lives with anyone. In phone discussions with the interviewees I emphasised that I did not intend to ask about their personal lives, but about the fun-ctioning of the service system in their cases. Two of the people who were contacted refused to be interviewed.

The ages of the children and adolescents in this study ranged from 12 to 18 years.

At the time of the interviews, five of them were staying in child protection institutions, and one outside the institution with the support of post-custodial services. Interviews with the children and adolescents were carried out on the premises of the child pro-tection institution. The parents were interviewed at the institution, in a café, or - in one case - at the interviewee’s home. An interpreter was used in interviews with one of the parents. All except one of the children and adolescents had been born in Finland.

The parents’ countries of origin were in the former Soviet Union, Africa and the Middle East. All the children and adolescents participating in this study had been placed in the custody of child protection authorities.

As parents agreed to personal interviews, I asked them for permission to interview their children who were in institutional care. Parents and children were interviewed separately. One interviewee asked to be present at the child’s interview, and one child requested the presence of the mother. These requests were granted, despite my awareness that the parent’s presence may influence a child’s responses.

The theme-interview outlines used with parents and children were similar in content.

The interview themes had been planned to facilitate capturing the way the intervie-wees attached meaning to their experiences as clients of child protection services.

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With the aid of the predefined themes, the interview talk took a form that allowed for later analysis of the data. This analysis concerned the effectiveness of the service system and the ways in which the client had gained resources (become empowered) with the help of the service system.

One of the questions posed in the interviews concerned the situation of the family before they became clients of child protection services. I asked what kinds of support and help the family had received before they became clients of social service based child protection, and why that help had not been sufficient. Next, they described their experiences of receiving community-based child protection services, specifying what kinds of support had been offered and how that help affected the family’s ability to cope. Finally, we discussed institutional care and the support it provided. A further crucial issue concerned the perceptions held by clients of immigrant background.

How could the child protection system be developed in the future, to better serve their needs? Had their views on the child protection system changed during the time they received services?

Naturally, the interview style and talk used with parents differed from that used with children and adolescents. The ‘terminology’ of the child protection system was not used with either group (e.g. terms like community-based services, etc.). Everyday language was used in referring to such concepts. For children and adolescents, the interview themes were formulated so that it was easy form them to understand what was being asked (for example: “What happened at school when you could not focus on what the teacher was saying?”).

In this study, I have combined two styles of analysis: one grounded in the data, and one based on theory. The transcribed interview material was first categorised fol-lowing the theme-interview framework. I collected from the interview talk the views expressed by parents, children and adolescents, regarding what had supported them and what had not. I utilised the theoretical framework and concept of empowerment in systemising and categorising the research data.

P

When a family moves to Finland from another country, the lives of the family mem-bers become entwined with a variety of municipal services (maternity and children’s clinics, day care, school, morning and afternoon activities and youth work), which can support the family significantly without any particular need to problematise the situation. The entirety of child protection thus includes the development of the child’s growth environment as a whole, the last resort being child and family specific child protection. The forms of child and family specific child protection are the following:

Assessment of need for child protection, community-based child protection services, urgent placement, placing the child in custody, institutional or foster care, and post-placement care.

The children of all the parents who were interviewed exhibited serious problems of behaviour and concentration in day care or at school. The children of one family

stop-ped going to school altogether. It is not evident from the interviews who or in what instance reported the family to child protection authorities. From the interview talk it becomes evident, though, that day care or school staff contacted child protection aut-horities because of the problems encountered at the day care centre or at the school.

In some cases the problems had to do with the child’s behavioural problems or, in the case of schools, learning difficulties, for which the day care centre or school could find no cause by using its own professional networks. One interviewee, a mother, contacted a crisis service of the municipal social service system because of serious crisis situations that had been repeatedly occurring in the family for an extended period. The mother of one child described a visit by the police in connection with a domestic violence situation, but the actual report to the child protection authorities was done by the child’s school.

The parents’ interview responses contained descriptions of a variety of challenges that a family of immigrant origin faces in Finland. Internal family relationships become strained because of pressures in working life and lacking language skills, among ot-her things. The lack of relatives and local networks results in loneliness, and it is not always easy to create new networks and relationships.

The parents recounted how the factors leading to the children’s problems stemmed from the families’ internal problems. Most parents described a marital crisis leading to problems in the children’s lives.

“There were many problems, my son went to school and starting school happened at the exact same time we were getting divorced. My son lived in a world of such fear and uncertainty, he didn’t know anything about his parents’ relationship, and I was of course tense myself, and then he couldn’t be at school any longer and he was aggressive there (at school). And I was working and my nerves were frayed all the time (….) like we were in the mid-dle of a crisis, and a crisis will easily spread and crises don’t tend to stop easily, so we were all in a crisis and we all reacted on a very emotional level, and my son suffered from this a lot (…) I couldn’t do anything, I was really out of it.” (father 1)

This excerpt from an interview with a father brings up the themes of conflicts between husband and wife, and the fear and uncertainty of a child living in a broken home.

The father describes how work took up much of his time and resources, and how he had no knowledge or ideas on how to help his son and family. Underlying the conflicts between spouses, and conflicts within the family generally, there may be traumatic experiences related to the parents’ situation as refugees. Such experiences may be eclipsed by the family’s overall situation, and often they have not been processed.

The father continues his story of the family’s crisis:

“I, for example, have a very traumatic background, I have seen slaughter, I have seen people butchered like no Finnish person fortunately has. Except war veterans. Like I have seen women and children butchered before my eyes. ’cos you see all kinds of things. Well that’s one reason. (father 1)

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The two excerpts above describe experiences of life so distant from each other that it is hard to imagine the speaker being the same husband and father in both cases. In the first excerpt, the father describes the conflicts of divorce, the pressures of working life and his helplessness when faced with a child’s predicament. In the latter excerpt, the father talks about his extremely traumatic war experiences. The interview did not reveal if the father had received therapy, for example, or if he had had opportunities to talk about his war experiences.

Since the 1990’s, significant improvements have been implemented in the Finnish so-cial and health care system in order to serve and support clients with experiences of war and other traumatic events. People with refugee background are still a relatively new client group in our country. Saurama (2002, 239) claims that social work encoun-ters many societal phenomena in advance, before people are able to recognise and name them. The concern expressed by the social workers I interviewed, regarding insufficient therapy services and ineffective service paths, is an important viewpoint in the development of services targeted for immigrant families, and especially in the prevention of problems in families.

The interview data contains a variety of observations on different cultural views of childrearing and on the effects of the parents’ education on their integration to the new country. The parents describe idealistic expectations that immigrants may have when arriving in Finland. The interviewees express that expectations of a better life, employment and financial security are not, however, easily fulfilled without a support network, family and relatives. Life may drift to a crisis. The network of officials is not perceived as supportive or helpful in such crises, but rather as a source of rules that limit and prohibit. At its worst, it causes a paralysis and a collapse of the individual and the life of the whole family. The immigrant does not feel at home in Finland, but returning to the country of origin would be an even worse alternative. Returning to the homeland would mean losing face in the eyes of the family, relatives and local community who live there.

E

All the children interviewed for this study described changing schools and social cir-cles numerous times as the family moved. The interview talk of the children and ado-lescents reflects the presence of constant insecurity and change before they were placed in custody and moved into the institutional care. The children and adolescents did not directly recount the causes or circumstances that had led to them being re-ported to child protection authorities. In their interview talk, it is also interesting that they do not describe, for example, the workers they have met. When talking about family workers involved in community-based child protection, for example, they did not assess the effects of the work on the family’s life, but rather described what they had done with the family workers.

Below I will give examples of an adolescent’s experiences of everyday life in the family before he was placed in custody and institutional care was arranged. The

in-The family’s daily life and the offered

support forms and services Adolescent (18 y) describes the daily life of his family and the services they received

The family's situation reaches crisis, moving house several times, changing schools, repeating a school year, several visits by police and ambulance

“that situation got so bad then, everybody was shouting at each other, the children shouted at each other, the situation got worse and worse”

The mother of the family asks the mother of the adolescent's friend to help, and gets the number of a crisis phone line

“Then suddenly family workers came, the situation calmed down”

Family work helps the mother and children

to cope “They (family workers) came and asked

how are you doing and helped mother with the household and paid bills and. Mother said that angels came to help us. Dad got paranoid: who are these, he asked. They (family workers) asked mum too how she was, made mum happy, but when they (fa-mily workers) left the old mum came back.

We baked with them (family workers), they took us to Seurasaari and we went to the movies and so on..”

Table 1: The daily life of a family and child protection community services as experienced by an ado-lescent

In the table above, I have collected from the adolescent's interview talk his views on the family's situation before the children were placed in custody. The interview talk clearly shows the chaotic nature of the family's life, with the children trying to survive by being loyal to both the father, who suffers from serious mental health problems, and the mother, who gets physically abused. In the background, there is the influence of a strong ethnic community that supports the family, but on the other hand controls and steers the family’s life. The police and ambulance workers sometimes “pop in”

in the family's life. According to the interview material, they visit the family because of emergency calls made about the family, “to check the situation”. The adolescent ponders the visits these professionals made to his home:

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The family’s daily life and the offered

support forms and services Adolescent (18 y) describes the daily life of his family and the services they received

The family's situation reaches crisis, moving house several times, changing schools, repeating a school year, several visits by police and ambulance

“that situation got so bad then, everybody was shouting at each other, the children shouted at each other, the situation got worse and worse”

terview talk shows the family’s chaotic daily life that was occasionally interrupted by community services, in the form of family work.

“he (father) took mom by the hand and smacked it into the window. There’s still a big slash wound on mom’s hand. Then we (children) called the ambu-lance and the ambuambu-lance guys asked what happened. All of us (children) were all quiet, the ambulance guys asked what had happened, a hand can’t go through a window suddenly like that. We were all quiet, dad looked at us all. He (father) said, mum slipped. The ambulance guys said it’s not pos-sible to slip like that. They asked at first, but they didn’t dare then either, they (ambulance staff) were like these short fellows, in their early twenties”

(adolescent 18)