The Responsibility Team—A Way to Ensure Children’s Right to Participation?

Abstract

Children’s effective participation seems to be difficult to achieve in practice. Although the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child came into force in 1989, recent research reports that effective participation rarely occurs. This qualitative study explores a group of adolescents’ views on participating in child welfare ‘responsibility teams’ (RTs) in Norway. The two specific foci are experiences regarding influence on their own situation and how the RT model may be a useful way to ensure children’s right to participate. The study concludes that RT alone cannot ensure children’s right to participate in the form of effective participation and that professional competencies are also important. The study calls for further research, especially on children and adolescents’ own experiences with RTs.