Torbjörn Forkby

Questions of control in child protection decision making: Laypersons’ monitoring and governance in child protection committees in Sweden

Summary In Sweden, decision making in child protection is heavily dependent on laypersons appointed to municipal child protection committees (CPCs). These laypersons have the power to decide upon proposals coming from professionals. Members of the committees are appointed from among their political party’s members. In the committee, they are supposed to act as judicious laypersons equipped with sound judgement. In this study, 31 committee meetings in three municipalities were followed using observational techniques and audio recordings. The appointed CPC members’ decision-making processes and communicative strategies to influence social work practice were analysed. Findings The results show differences between the CPCs, indicating localized decision-making cultures. The representatives worked (not as party politicians, but) as a team with the professionals as counterparts. Communication strategies, most frequently questions, were used to govern the social work practice, over and above the decision making. Questions served both to obtain the information needed and also to exert normative influence by setting up a normative grid for ways to pass the committee. Applications This research shows that social work in Sweden has a long way to go until it is acknowledged full professional status. The study also suggests that improvements in the CPCs’ decision making need to be based on a closer look at the laypersons’ knowledge, values and common sense and how these aspects affect decision making.

Organisational exceptions as vehicles for change: collaborative strategies, trust, and counter strategies in local crime prevention partnerships in Sweden

ABSTRACT Enhanced collaboration is among the most common strategies in Swedish crime prevention. This includes multi-agency, cross-professional work and also coordinated activities between public authorities and civil society, often in the framework of a partnership approach. The social services bear the main responsibility for setting up and facilitating this collaboration. In this article, two crime prevention programmes in Gothenburg are analysed together. Both targeted gangs and social disturbances, and both used independent coordinators, mainly social workers, as key holders of the intervention strategy. The projects were investigated using an ethnographic mixed-method approach, where 51 interviews with stakeholders in the partnerships provide the main data used for the analysis. The interaction between these free-standing coordinators (labelled organisational exceptions) and the involved stakeholders reveals an intricate interplay of strategies and counterstrategies used either to evoke change and facilitate joint work or to resist intrusive actions on the part of the coordinators. By understanding the different logics of strategic and operative work in relation to the use of systematic or unsystematic data, as well as the need for the coordinator to gain legitimacy, a fundamental paradox in partnership approaches is indicated; in the process of obtaining a legitimate platform for change, the coordinators risked losing the contributions this platform was about to make.

‘I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but …’ – laypersons challenging the authority of professionals in Swedish child protection

Abstract In the early days of professionalism, occupations were characterised by decision-making freedoms and strong jurisdictional rights. Since then, several ways of controlling and monitoring professionals have been introduced alongside the rise and reformulations of the modern welfare state. Professions have been challenged by, bureaucracy, market solutions and demands for transparency. These are examples of systematically developed counterforces to professional autonomy. A much less studied way of controlling and monitoring professionals is the institution of laypersons, which finds its legitimacy on the grounds that non-experts play the superior role to professionals. Through layperson committees, Swedish child protection advocates have extensive rights when deciding upon some of the most intrusive decisions that the state can make against families, namely, whether children are to be removed from their parents. This article analyses how laypersons challenge the authority of professionals in Swedish child protection. It is based on observations of layperson committees and semi-structured interviews with committee members. The results show that the jurisdictional boundaries are constructed in relation to groupthink, where the laypersons can be the cure for social workers developing unprofessional behaviours and remain as outsiders to the professionals. Another important finding of the study is the ambivalence and paradoxes that arise when it comes to understanding the layperson’s role in relation to at least five topics: formal training; identity as a professional, theoretical knowledge; the normative field laypersons should relate to; and the layperson’s impact. The ambivalence of the ideological boundaries can be seen as a weakness for the layperson.

Collaboration as Usual? The Swedish Approach to Prevention and Intervention with Troublesome Youth Groups

Sweden can on the one hand be recognized as a socially stable country, with an active welfare state which aims to redistribute resources between different groups of people and attain high levels of social cohesion. It has also a long-standing tradition of preventative social work. On the other hand, Sweden is a country currently in transition with tensions between social groups arising as a consequence of globalization, migration, and urbanization. In this chapter, approaches to prevention and intervention with troublesome youth groups in Sweden are discussed from the perspective of how traditional approaches built on consensus and ideals of collaboration meet and respond to the perceived new phenomenon of street gangs, which perhaps challenges implicit ideas of how this kind of work should be done. The historical and cultural background to the development of prevention and intervention approaches is outlined in order to explain what kinds of responses have been developed and suggest why they have developed the way they have. Drawing on three empirical research projects in Gothenburg, Sweden, we examine more closely the central aspects of a Swedish approach based on collaborative values and multi-agency consensus. The strengths and weaknesses of “Case Sweden” are interesting, it is argued, not just on their own merits but also to understand the role of cultural context in developing and delivering interventions for troublesome youth groups.