This article elucidates the challenges parents face when they lose the care of their children and their experiences of family counselling as a support service in Norway.A qualitative study following five mothers and one father whose children were in care was conducted through two focus groups and six individual interviews. The study found that the parents struggled to understand why their children had been placed in care and felt disempowered by the Child Protection Services (CPS). This situation led to complicated relationships with the CPS. We drew upon positioning theory and Goffman's theories about stigma and identity in this study, and these theories are explicitly used in discussing our analytic results. The study reveals the challenges encountered by CPS due to their dual role: On the one hand, they remove the children, and on the other, they offer support. The parents in this study also received assistance from the Family Counselling Services. Important results of this study are the parents' experiences of the two systems and, in particular, the different positions the systems seemed to place them in.
This article negotiates family therapists´ professional identities in the Family Counselling Services (FCS) in Norway and their experiences when following up parents whose children are placed in public care. A qualitative study following seven family therapists in the FCS, through focus groups and individual interviews, found that they struggle with contradictory positions within their professional identity when following up with these parents. This struggle involves a dichotomy between their personal feelings and their theoretical orientation as systemic therapists. Their dilemma becomes evident when the two systems emphasise different interpretations of the 'truth', and when they react to how the welfare system, in general, treats these parents. This study argues that the systemic family therapy approach seems to be useful both for handling the parents' often fragmented stories, and for reconnecting these parents to society through allowing them to tell their own stories. A particularly demanding challenge for therapists in these situations is that the help they have to offer is inadequate in relation to the complexity and enormity of the needs of these parents. Thus, collaboration with other welfare instances is particularly important in these cases, but this collaboration brings its own complications. Knowledge about each other's service and mandates is therefore particularly important for constructive and non-judgmental collaboration.
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I denne artikkelen utforsker vi hvordan barnevernets risikoorientering og barnesentrering kan få utilsiktede konsekvenser for profesjonell praksis. Alvorlige barnevernssaker innebærer utfordrende og vanskelige vurderinger, hvor de etiske dilemmaene blir ekstra krevende. Vi undersøker hvordan økt fokus på avdekking av alvorlig vold og omsorgssvikt har virket inn på barnevernets arbeid, på hvilken måte foreldre opplever barnevernet som problemfokusert i samarbeidet og hvordan dette svekker tilliten til fagpersoner som skal hjelpe dem. I en tid hvor barnevernet er utsatt for sterk kritikk både internasjonalt og nasjonalt, og hvor denne kritikken retter seg mot barnevernets manglende fokus på gjenforening og tilrettelegging for samvær mellom barn og foreldre, ønsker vi å bidra til en kritisk reflekterende diskusjon om hvordan den politiske, sosiale og internasjonale sammenhengen som det norske barnevernet inngår i, virker inn på faglige dreininger i praksis. Våre analyser bygger på empiri fra to Ph.D.-prosjekter som omhandler henholdsvis barn som opplever vold i nære relasjoner, og oppfølging av foreldre som er fratatt omsorgen for sine barn.
Nøkkelord: barnevern, vold og omsorgssvikt, barnesentrering, risikoorientering, tillit, problemfokus
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