Evaluating the participatory opportunities for service users within social welfare institutions is a pressing issue. In this article, we explore a group of ethnic minority parents' experiences with child welfare services (CWS) in Norway. A strong narrative theme was deficiency positioning-how lacking a Norwegian normative set of knowledge and skills challenged the parents' opportunities to participate. We analysed how deficiency positioning was perceived, negotiated, and contested in the parents' accounts, and 4 themes emerged: (a) learning to parent, (b) contesting expert knowledge, (c) learning to be a client, and (d) constructing CWS deficiency. Nancy Fraser's concept of "participatory parity" was applied to explore how current institutional structures may enable and limit parents' participation. The analysis provides insight into agencies and informants' sense-making processes as well as the diverse resources and strategies that parents draw upon in the CWS encounter.Furthermore, we argue that an interplay between a strong focus on "parenting skills" and bureaucratic and economic structures positions ethnic minority parents as deficient, thus providing powerful mechanisms for marginalization. Implications for case work and institutional levels are discussed. Paul's reference to the "scandal" of poor information for refugees about the mandate of Norwegian CWS can be linked to recent debates in international media where ethnic minority parents criticize Norwegian CWS, stating that these services lack cultural sensitivity and wrongfully intervene in families' lives (Skivenes, 2014). Paul's claim can also be linked to a broader debate within social work regarding cultural diversity and the competencies that social workers must possess to meet the specific needs of ethnic minority populations (Freund & Band-Winterstein, 2015;Williams, 2006).In this article, we explore these questions from the perspective of ethnic minority parents who have encountered Norwegian CWS. We --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

As part of a larger research project, we interviewed ten parents with refugee backgrounds about their experiences of contact with child welfare services in Norway. Despite parents describing both positive and negative experiences, and trust as well as distrust, we found that fear of the child welfare services was a central theme. Thematic analyses showed that fear of the child welfare services was not primarily related to the interviewees' own negative experiences, but to a variety of perceptions or representations of the child welfare services that informants described as common or prevalent among people from ethnic minorities in general. We found that the representations of the child welfare services could be categorized into the following themes: 1) child welfare services primarily take children away from parents, 2) child welfare services do not go into dialogue with parents, and 3) child welfare services discriminate against ethnic minority families. The analysis is discussed critically in light of Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser's understandings of recognition and social justice. We suggest that the parents' fear of the child welfare services can be understood as fear of experiencing humiliation and disrespect through contact with child welfare services; fear of losing their children, becoming invisible and being discriminated against. A key implication of the study is the need for further research that examines the fear of child welfare among people from ethnic minorities, as well as measures that address distrust of services in parts of the population.

Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. • Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. • Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. • User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of 'fair dealing' under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) • Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.

No abstract

The metaphor of navigation has been used to investigate the social and moral movements people make in changeable or fluctuating circumstances, as well as to shed light on the intersection of people, practices and the changing contexts and social forces around them. In this chapter, we first provide a short overview of navigation as a metaphor, and how the situations of young refugees might add to the multiple meanings of navigation. Using empirical data from the international NordForsk-funded project Drawing Together: Relational wellbeing in the lives of young refugees in Finland, Norway and Scotland, we explore how young refugees socially and morally navigate through the complex and unstable circumstances of building new lives and new social networks in host countries. Then, turning to our findings, we discuss how ‘living well’ involves not only movement towards individual goals, but also movement with, for the sake of, and in relation to important people locally and transnationally. We conclude the chapter by envisioning the destination of young refugees’ navigation as hinted at by the data: a world worth living in for all.