In the organization of child care services, constraints restrict the potential for children's participation in the formation and delivery of support programmes. These constraints involve the prioritization of risk management, poor understandings of what participation entails, and entrenched socio-cultural perspectives of children as vulnerable and requiring protection. However, when children's participation is recognized as an imperative, both morally and as a means of enhancing service efficiency, and when organizational visions and practice ideologies uphold the importance of children's involvement in decision-making, spaces for children's agency can become part of everyday practice routines. Drawing on three examples of organizational innovations in child-directed social work, this article explores the benefits involved in "organizing for children's agency".

A B S T R AC TThe concept of children's agency can be used to understand how children actively shape their lives. While in social work there is a growing body of research on how children experience meetings that involve collaborating professionals, little is known about the ways in which they exert an influence. The purpose of the study is, in a Swedish context, to investigate children's perceptions of their agentic capacity in regulating participation and exerting an influence on outcomes in interprofessional collaborative meetings. Interviews were carried out with 28 children in receipt of social services support. Findings revealed that children perceive professionals' talk as restricting opportunities for input. They also perceive that they have the capacity to exercise agency by (i) conforming to expectations by feigning boredom and seeming disengaged, but at the same time paying close attention; (ii) by using exit strategies; and (iii) by developing 'in-situ' strategies to end meetings. Rather than, as previously suggested, being powerless in such circumstances, the children tell how they carefully assess situations, and, from a position of apparent subordination, talk of ways of acting that reveal their agentic capacity. These insights are of importance for practitioners who are encouraged to look beyond behaviours that first meet the eye.

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Dating violence prevalence is increasing and effective prevention and intervention methods are needed in order to adress this growing social problem. The use of on-line game-based intervention programmes open ups new possibilities for social worker practice of interventions on a large scale. The purpose of this study was to examine young people´s experiences of a on line game-based intervention programme designed to adress dating-violence among youths. Swedish youths that took part in the intervention programme were interviewed in focus-groups. Results indicate that the use of a game as an intervention method for this socially sensitive topic was perceived as positive by the young people, seeing it as a new, engaging and interesting method. The findings from the study indicate that on-line game-based programme addressing dating violence between young people has the potential to be used as a technical tool in social work practice.

As an extension of the research into strategies for handling economic adversity of young people in poor families, this study examines strategy use in the context of middle-income families affected by unemployment. Interviews with 39 young people in previously comfortably-off families where one or both of the parents had become unemployed were conducted. The purpose was to explore how, in a Swedish context, young people think about and respond to situations following a drastic reduction in family income. Results indicate that while the strategies used by these young people are generally similar to those in poor families, no use of avoidance-oriented strategies was found. This, it is argued, is because parental unemployment and financial adversity are not perceived as stigmatizing.