Hanne Op de Beeck

Children’s Rights Indicators from Theory to Implementation: The Flemish Case

Through the creation of a ‘Flemish Action Plan for Children’s Rights 2011–2014’, the Flemish Government (Belgium) engaged itself, amongst others, to develop a set of indicators to monitor the realization of children’s rights. This commitment inspired the Children’s Rights Knowledge Centre (KeKi) to conduct a critical study about the use of indicators to monitor children’s rights. The study exists of a critical literature review regarding the creation of children’s rights indicators, an expert consultation and a participative followup of the steps taken by the Flemish Government in developing the indicators. In this article, the main challenges and opportunities that were identified through this study, are presented.

Social work research as a practice of transparency

Social work research is inherently normative and as such the assumptions about social problems in social work research should be open to scrutiny and contestation. But although researchers often face tussles and huge contradictions, they rarely articulate them. In this article, we report on a small research project in which a collective of social work researchers in Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium) tried to think critically through some of the questions and complexities they were confronted with in social work research, more specifically in research on poverty. Our research aim implied that we tried to discuss the choices that were made during a diversity of research projects, including making explicit the grounds on which this happened. We learned that the choices made, although they seem to be very obvious ones, often remained implicit during the different research processes. We conclude that social work research requires that researchers attempt to realize a practice of transparency. The pursuit of such a practice of transparency refers to the importance of the creation of reflexive space in research communities to collectively embrace and discuss the complexities of social work research.