Are laypersons equally valued as experts in a decision making body? The aim of this paper is to examine how members of a decision-making team—members with widely varying expertise and competency—experience crucial conditions for reasoned decision-making, i.e., whether they are fully informed about the facts in the case, whether they experience that they are equal […]

Child Welfare Removals by the State addresses a most important and underresearched legal proceeding: when the State intervenes in the private family sphere to remove children at risk to a place of safety, adoption, or other form of out-of-home care. An approach that is intrusive, contested, and very much a last resort, states’ interventions in […]

This paper examines the significant obstacles that child protection workers in four countries, England, Finland, Norway and the USA (CA), believe they would face at their workplace, in a case of a child removal decision. There are many potential barriers employees may experience in their work practice, either external factors, organizational factors or individual factors, […]

The English language term ‘permanence’ is increasingly used in high income countries as a ‘short-hand’ translation for a complex set of aims around providing stability and family membership for children who need child welfare services and out-of-home care. From a scrutiny of legislative provisions, court judgments, government documents and a public opinion survey on child […]

This paper draws on an international comparative study of social work decision making in cases that are on the edge of care order proceedings, involving child protection workers from Finland, Norway, England and the USA (California). It focuses on workers’ responses in an online questionnaire to questions about the use of independent experts to inform […]