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To improve child protection investigations the framework for assessment ”BBIC – Barns Behov I Centrum” [Children’s needs in the centre] was introduced in Sweden just after the new millennium, with the first full training resource published in 2006. There is a lack of research in Sweden about child protection work in cases of intimate partner violence generally and as regards BBIC specifically. However, a number of different sources indicate that there is a need for improvement of the BBIC system when it comes to this group of children at risk. For example, the national inspections of the local authorities’ work with abused women and children exposed to intimate partner violence carried out so far point to serious problems in child protection practice. Since BBIC was introduced the system has been amended and revised several times. A major revision was carried out in 2015. An important question is what these revisions may mean for the handling of cases of intimate partner violence. The aim of the paper is to map and assess how the issue of children’s exposure to violence has been addressed in the different versions of BBIC between 2006 and 2015. Surveying training resources and other documents from the last decade, we outline how there has been a gradual and partial inclusion of the issue of children’s exposure to violence over time, and discuss to what extent these amendments constitute a shift in perspective and emphasis major enough to be likely to impact positively on practice.

To improve child protection investigations the framework for assessment ”BBIC – Barns Behov I Centrum” [Children’s needs in the centre] was introduced in Sweden just after the new millennium, with the first full training resource published in 2006. There is a lack of research in Sweden about child protection work in cases of intimate partner violence generally and as regards BBIC specifically. However, a number of different sources indicate that there is a need for improvement of the BBIC system when it comes to this group of children at risk. For example, the national inspections of the local authorities’ work with abused women and children exposed to intimate partner violence carried out so far point to serious problems in child protection practice. Since BBIC was introduced the system has been amended and revised several times. A major revision was carried out in 2015. An important question is what these revisions may mean for the handling of cases of intimate partner violence. The aim of the paper is to map and assess how the issue of children’s exposure to violence has been addressed in the different versions of BBIC between 2006 and 2015. Surveying training resources and other documents from the last decade, we outline how there has been a gradual and partial inclusion of the issue of children’s exposure to violence over time, and discuss to what extent these amendments constitute a shift in perspective and emphasis major enough to be likely to impact positively on practice.

This study explores the pivotal role of the body for political recognition and rights claims in child welfare "moral" interventions. I examine how the bodily figures in child welfare assessments, linking these manifestations to the concept of the moral economy of care. A sample of assessment reports from a Swedish municipality, all addressing violations of children's bodies or integrity, are used as empirical material. I show how the psychosomatically suffering child is being best "heard" as vulnerable. I also argue that such a moral economy of care silences children's accounts of gendered and racial injustices. Furthermore, racialized moral divides are indicated when assessments of different child bodies are considered. A concluding remark points to need for a child welfare moral economy of social justice that responds to structural intersecting injustices in childhoods, including to those of a racialized child welfare and its individualized and symptom-oriented services.   

This article is a discursive examination of children's status as knowledgeable moral agents within the Swedish child welfare system and in the widely used assessment framework BBIC. Departing from Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, three discursive positions of children's moral status are identified: amoral, im/moral and dis/loyal. The findings show the undoubtedly moral child as largely missing and children's agency as diminshed, deviant or rendered ambiguous. Epistemic injustice applies particularly to disadvantaged children with difficult experiences who run the risk of being othered, or positioned as reproducing or accomodating to the very same social problems they may be vicitimised by.

Children’s Needs in Focus: A Framework with Children’s Knowledge in Focus? 

There are different frameworks for risk and needs assessment that can be used by social workers in child welfare in encounters with children who are in risk of suffering significant harm. BBIC, which is the Swedish abbreviation for ‘Children’s Needs in Focus’ is widely used in the context of Swedish child protection system. BBIC is a modified version of the Integrated Children’s System from the United Kingdom that has been adapted to Swedish conditions, legislation and practice.

In this presentation, I will give an overview of my PhD project which focuses on BBIC in relation to children who are exposed to violence in intimate relationships. I present a critical analysis of BBIC by mapping out different knowledge cultures; the ‘evidence-based’ scientific knowledge that BBIC is based upon, and some explanation models from the field of violence research and practice. I discuss how particular explanation models about violence in intimate relationships also give different accounts about children and violence. This will be linked to a discussion about what status is granted children’s ‘opinions’ and children as knowledgeable agents in this complex context. Using posters from Operation Kvinnofrid, a campaign against men’s violence against women as an example, I illustrate the knowledges and explanations that are part of the BBIC-frame, as well as those that fall outside. 

The essay draws on the shifting methodology in an ongoing multi-sited digital ethnography research project about vaccination-related social media forums. The research, which focuses on vaccine caution and vaccine confidence, was initially directed by ‘following the conflict,’ one of the strategies of following thatGeorge Marcus discusses in his methodology for multi-sited ethnography. However, over the course of time, and after improvisations related to access, positionality, the changing nature of digital content and context of interactions, the initial focus on ‘the war on vaccines’ shifted into a challenging ofoversimplified ideas of oppositional stances, division, and ‘conflict’. What I refer to as ‘following agreements within the conflict’ helps to highlight how the forum members, regardless of their stance, can challenge debate divisions − such as scientific–unscientific, medical–anti-medical, research evidence–anecdotal evidence, and individual–public − while still adhering to medico-scientific discourses as zones of agreements. This enables a modest effort to put both vaccine caution and vaccine confidence on the map of improvisations of health activism and the social movements more generally. Inaddition, it highlights the limits to liminality. In an adult-centric debate that silences young people’s views on (child) vaccinations, I propose the strategy of ‘following silences’ as an additional form of agreement. Finally, I argue that afocus on agreements and silences in conflicts is in alignment with anthropological and post-structural research which commonly focuses onliminal zones and continuities and sheds light on complexities in a nuanced and ‘thick’ manner.

Presentationen utgår från den delen av min doktorsavhandling och senare vidareutvecklingar som kretsar kring den sociala barnavårdens praktik; mer specifikt barnavårdsutredningar (barn upp till 12 år) och eventuella rekommenderade åtgärder som respons på intersektionella orättvisor i barndomar. Jag belyser förändringsbehov och möjligheter till ett socialt arbete där rättighets- och rättviseperspektiv hamnar i förgrunden - bortom biovälfärdens dilemman.

Ett av biovälfärdens dilemman är att säkerställa att barndomar är fria från våld samtidigt som våldets och orättvisornas symptom är i blickpunkten, inte problemet och orättvisorna i sig. Fokus på långtgående risker och psykosomatiska konsekvenser synliggör inte bara vissa våldssituationer och våldsformer framför andra. Det förstärker även professionellas och forskningens betydelse i utredningar. Dock medför detta också en objektifiering av barnkroppar varför barns delaktighet som rättighetsbärande subjekt med röst blir svårt att leva upp till. Vidare diskuteras avsaknaden av respons på orättvisor i form av rasism och våld utanför hemmet samt åtgärdernas begränsningar i relation till skydd. En slutsats som dras är att skydd på inget enkelt sätt kan likställas med insatser annat än när det rör sig om tvångsåtgärder.  

Möjligheterna är många till en bättre hantering av problem genom förändrade lösningar. Jag diskuterar behovet av att utforma nya insatser som är frivilliga och skyddande samt vikten av att stärka unga människors delaktighet såväl i insatsutformningen som vid rekommendation av insatser. Det räcker dock inte att enbart identifiera nya insatsbehov så länge insatser förutsätter vuxnas samtycke. Förändringsbehov avseende dessa villkor behöver därför ses över. 

George Marcus’s methodology for multi-sited ethnography is widely discussed and applied in anthropology and the strategy of ‘following the conflict’ has been a fruitful approach to studying controversies and conflicts. Drawing on my shifting methodology in the initial stages of a digital ethnography project on vaccination-related online community forums, I explore ‘the war’ on vaccines using a broadened strategy that includes following agreements and silences within the controversy. By examining the debate in conjunction with medical anthropology research, I discuss how both vaccine-cautious and vaccine-confident forum members challenge conventional debate divisions, such as scientific–unscientific, evidential–anecdotal and genetic–environmental, while still adhering to medico-scientific discourses as zones of agreement. Whereas an agreement-oriented methodology contributes to research on liminal zones and reconfigured forms of bio-citizenship and literacy, the strategy of ‘following silences’ highlights the limits to liminality in a debate underpinned by adultism that silences the views of young people.

The current thesis discusses how tools for analysing power are developed predominately for adults, and thus remain underdeveloped in terms of understanding injustices related to age, ethnicity/race and gender in childhoods. The overall ambition of this dissertation is to inscribe a discourse of intersecting social injustices as relevant for childhoods and child welfare, and by interlinking postcolonial, feminist, and critical childhood studies. The dissertation is set empirically within the policy and practice of Swedish child welfare, here exemplified by the assessment framework Barns Behov i Centrum (BBIC). It aims to explore how Swedish child welfare, as a field of knowledge, modes of knowing and knowing subjects, constitutes an arena for claims and responses to intersecting social justice issues.

The material consists of BBIC primers and selected samples from, a total of 283 case reports from a Swedish social service agency. The case reports address assessments of children (0­­–12 years of age). This dissertation is based on four qualitative studies using discourse analysis, as well as analysis inspired by thematic and case-study methodology. Two studies focus on child welfare discourses in BBIC documents involving social problems and violence, and two studies are based on child welfare case reports.

Studies I­­-II address child welfare policy and practice by analysing the conditions required for children to participate, in terms of children’s moral status and in terms of status of ‘evidencing’ needs for protection. Studies III­­-IV explore this further from the perspective of intersecting and embodied social injustices in childhoods. Together, the studies interconnect child welfare as a field of knowledge, modes of knowing and knowers with child welfare as a moral arena for claims to rights, recognition, and social justice.

The synthesised findings point to child biowelfare, in which justice discourses are largely absent. Biowelfare is informed by a mode of knowing and ‘evidencing’ risks to children’s health and development, which are confined to scientific predicting-believing, seeing-believing by professionals and a moral economy of care, all of which constrain the idea that injustices are structural and intersecting. Biowelfare primarily responds to children as ‘speaking’ biological bodies, rather than as voices of justice. In this sense, injustices of an epistemological nature are interconnected with social injustices. When issues of justice are mobilised in case reports and policy, they come across as rather ‘unjust’, primarily confined to the sphere of the family home of racialised children and not connected to ‘general’ children. In addition to intersections of age, ethnicity/race and gender, class and health are fundamental to recognition and protection in biowelfare. Finally, the dissertation indicates the need for a moral economy which responds to intersecting social injustices such as racial, gender-based and ageist violence in childhoods, and violations of children’s bodily integrity.

Key words: biowelfare, child protection, child welfare, critical childhood studies, critical social work, embodiment, epistemic injustice, epistemology, feminist theory, intersectionality, justice subjectivity, moral economy, moral subjectivity, participation, postcolonial theory, poststructural social work, social justice, violence

Aim

This paper discusses the ‘translation’ of a child welfare assessment model from the English Child Integrated System ICS to a Swedish counterpart, BBIC (abbreviation for Children’s Needs in Focus). The focus is on the discursively produced knowledge on violence in intimate relationships in the context of child welfare assessments.

Background

BBIC is a conceptual risk and needs framework and a modified version of the English ICS that has been adapted to ‘Swedish conditions’, legislation and practice. The study examines this geopolitical ‘translation’ from one system to another looking at how these modifications can be understood in relation to what is often regarded as a cross-cultural phenomenon: (children at risk of) domestic violence. Using the concept of translatability, the paper critically explores the ‘universal’ claims regarding risk, violence and security that remain through the translation process and what knowledge and assumptions that are possible to incorporate, adapt to or even abandon altogether. 

Method

Discourse analysis is used as analytical framework with which evaluations, reports and research linked to BBIC and ICS are analysed.

Findings

The analysis of this research addresses risk assessment approaches in the context of child welfare systems and the prevailing understandings of violence in intimate relationships they generate, as well as those that are open up for contestation when children are in focus of analysis. 

Conclusion

Multifaceted approaches across disciplines, cultures as well as a merging of theory and practice are commonly advocated approaches towards complex social problems. The analysis indicates what is considered to be legitimate evidence-based practice in these contexts and what kind of understandings of domestic violence are generated in the context of child welfare assessments. 

Knowledge and theory are developed by adults, for adults, and often about adults. This includes mainstream research about children and youth, which is frequently criticised for being adultcentric. Similar critique is also applicable to feminist theory, feminist philosophy, and other critical studies that focuses largely on adults. With these insights, it is necessary to consider whether and how the feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic justice might be useful in attempting to address social justice issues in childhoods and youth.

The concept of epistemic injustice, as discussed by Fricker, has helped to highlight racist and sexist discriminatory practices. Such injustices are claimed to be founded on prejudices and unjustified treatment. However, it could be challenging to conceptualise epistemic wrongdoings in these ways when it comes to how people and groups, such as children and minors, who are often regarded as irrational or cognitively and morally immature, are treated. Children and adolescents are generally regarded to have lower epistemic capacities than adults since they are not fully developed. In developmental psychology, for example, these developmentalist representations are considered as facts and findings, rather than prejudiced. Additionally, the traditional conception of knowledgeable and morally capable subjects may include moral and ethical obligations. Children may not end up in prisons after committing crime in those environments where it is believed that they lack the capacity to discern right from wrong. And yet, the same conception of children also denies them the right to vote in “democratic” societies and be taken seriously as knowledgeable and moral service users, patients or pupils.

In this essay, I make an attempt to elaborate on epistemic justice through the lenses of critical childhood studies, postcolonial feminist theory and intersectionality. Drawing on my doctoral dissertation on intersecting injustices in child welfare social work in Sweden, I describe instances in which children are subject to epistemic injustices. I argue that the psychobiological objectification of children, the exclusion of children's narratives as accounts of evidence and (in)justice but also distinctive modes of moral differentiation and othering of some children's childhoods, are all examples of epistemic injustices in childhoods. Finally, I turn to research on child and youth activism to highlight some important considerations that a recognition of children and young people as epistemic and moral subjects brings to the debate about epistemic justice issues as well as in imagining less adultist and more child-friendly societies and worldviews.

Apart from global inequalities and structural obstacles at the university level, there are additional discipline-specific challenges concerning internationalisation work in higher education. This paper will discuss these issues in relation to social work as an academic discipline and profession and from the perspective of my work as an international coordinator and assistant professor in a social work education programme in a Swedish context. First, I introduce social work as an ambiguous discipline and profession concerning its nationalised-international nexus. By drawing attention to a concrete current political development, I discuss the paradoxical relationship between, on the one hand, the global definition of social work and, on the other hand, criticism of nationalised social work and its Eurocentrism and professional imperialism. Addressing decolonial critical pedagogy and the notions of epistemic disobedience, unlearning, and pluriversity, I discuss how to work for change within the mentioned constraints.

Projekt i planerings- och uppstartsfas

Forskningsprojektet fokuserar på Socialtjänstens insatser för barn upp till 12 års åldern och baserar sig på tidigare forskning som visar att trots de många frivilliga insatser för barn som finns och rekommenderas barn i dag ger insatserna sällan skydd från våld och kräkningar.

Förutom behovsanalyser avseende nya insatser som ger skydd syftar projektet också till att undersöka hur barn görs delaktiga när information om insatser ges, vilka insatser som rekommenderas, samt vid utformning av insatser. Vidare utforskas de socialpolitiska möjligheterna och begränsningarna för detta förändringsarbete och den ökade delaktigheten för barn som brukare och nya skyddsorienterade insatser detta inbegriper, liksom förutsättningarna för barn att tillvarata skyddande frivilliga insatser. 

Behovsanalysen kommer att basera sig på 

-       Kartläggningar av befintliga insatser utifrån ett skydds- och delaktighetsperspektiv

-       Intervjuer med barn som har varit brukare 

-       Gruppintervjuer med professionella

-       Policyanalyser   

This paper discusses the knowledge transmission from the English Integrated Children’s System to Swedish BBIC, ‘Children’s Needs in Focus’, in the light of comparative approaches towards child welfare, contemporary advocacy for cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural approaches, and the emphasis on knowledge-based social work. The focus is on the conceptual framework of risk assessments in the context of the Swedish child protection system. The purpose is to critically assess children’s epistemic position in these complex processes of knowledge distribution. 

Discourse analysis is used as a framework for analysis of evaluations, reports and research linked to BBIC and ICS. With the concept epistemic culture, I look more closely at knowledge production and what is included in the realm of ‘evidence’ and research, as well as what is considered to be knowledge-based social work. Such an approach allows for analyses of epistemic cultures that are not necessarily confined to space and instead are widespread and distributed in line with other logics. 

Preliminary findings indicate how a knowledge transfer serve as a knowledge-legitimizing practice which in many ways exemplifies a homogenization of two geopolitically distinct contexts. From this point of view, BBIC and ICS are tightly interlinked and may be seen as parts of one and the same epistemic culture, similar epistemologies and ontologies of childhood, as well as its epistemic subjects and objects of knowledge. What becomes comparative not only links the two systems’ assumptions of the universal but comparison in itself becomes a legitimizing practice. 

This paper suggests the importance of going beyond conventional comparative welfare approaches and pay more critical attention to epistemic cultures, a fields’ scientific communities, and disciplinary boundaries when trying to understand contemporary social work.

While temporality has been addressed in the context of child welfare, the temporal dimensions of differentiation and othering remain unacknowledged. This article draws on material from a Swedish child welfare agency and is theoretically inspired by postcolonial and queer theories and critical childhood studies. It is based on an analytical juxtaposition of care order applications recommending immediate child welfare interventions versus interventions that are recommended after long ongoing assessments. Such interventions are addressed as unequal in terms of timing. The article discusses temporal themes related to permanency verus temporary, which guide assessments of changeability. I show how immediate interventions respond to chronicity - the temporality of incurability, permanency, and underdevelopment. However, social problems in long ongoing assessments are assessed as permanent only after long ongoing observations or passage of time. The article discusses how ideas about change reproduce wider societal and intersecting inequalities. This becomes visible when considering time as allocated to parents and their potential to bring about change. I argue that even though permanency differs from chronicity, it still limits a discussion about change as societal, and the detection of problems remains within a developmentalist neoliberal framework. In the conclusing remarks, I offer an alternative reading of allocated time that can manoeuvre developmentalist logics, while balancing responsibilisation between the individualn and the society.     

Using the metaphors body and voice and drawing on critical contributions on biopolitics, this article interrogates children's participation rights in a knowledge culture of 'evidencing'. With child welfare and protection practice as an empirical example, I analyse written assessment reports from a Swedish child welfare agency, all exemplifying how social workers evidence needs for protection and reasons for removing children from the home. I discuss how 'evidencing' equals a knowledge culture of seeing-believing and predicting-believing and the search for visibly damaged bodies and underdeveloped minds. I furthermore problematise how such conceptualisation of evidencing foregrounds children's 'speaking' bodies while silencing their voices. By showing these manifestations of evidencing, this critical contribution discusses some wider epistemic concerns for fields influenced by the knowledge cultures of 'the evidence-based'.  

Whether on the basis of embodied categories such as race or gender, or through diagnoses and suffering bodies, the body is said to constitute the political battleground for social in- and exclusion. This study is inspired methodologically by moral anthropological approaches and draws on scholarship that foregrounds the pivotal role of the body for political recognition and rights claims in humanitarian and other ‘moral’ interventions. I examine two analytically separated moral economies, the moral economy of care versus justice, as they manifest in child welfare responses to bodily vulnerability. A sample of investigations from a Swedish municipality, all addressing violations of children’s bodies or integrity, are used as empirical material. The article shows the objectified psychosomatically damaged bodies being best ‘heard’ as vulnerable. I argue that in such a moral economy of care, children’s accounts of racial and gendered injustices are silenced. Furthermore, a differentiation in the moralities mobilised when different child bodies are addressed suggests that a version of a moral economy of justice, i.e. a juridical moral response, is being used in unjust ways that reproduce racialized othering while leaving institutional racism without response. While central for a critical social work, equality, social justice and rights issues are downplayed in assessments, and largely lack corresponding welfare measures. A concluding remark is a need of a radical shift within social policy towards structural power perspectives which would not only require a re-thinking of vulnerability but also the role of child welfare itself and its individualised services.

Denna kartläggning ger en översiktlig bild av hur arbetet avseende våld i närarelationer ser ut idag i Malmö stad. Kartläggningen har gjorts på uppdrag av frivilligorganisationen Röda Korset i Region Syd i syfte att skapa ett underlag för framtida verksamheter med inriktning på våld i nära relationer. Materialet baseras huvudsakligen på ett brett urval av verksamheter som på olika sätt knyter an till detta samhällsproblem. Materialinsamlingen utgörs av besvarade frågeformulär och verksamheternas eget informationsmaterial, vilket i ett senare skede har analyserats ur ett genus- och intersektionalitetsperspektiv. Analysen går ut på att fånga upp såväl det specifika som det mer generella med detta arbete samt ge en belysning av de begräsningar som de befintliga insatserna skapar. Resultatet visar att de befintliga insatserna är omfattande men också att perspektivet på våld i nära relationer som problem skiftar mellan verksamheterna. 

Förutom att ta detta samhällsproblem på allvar och sätta sitt namn på kartan i relation till arbetet mot våld i nära relationer finns det mycket kvar som Röda Korset kan bidra med. Detta gäller i synnerhet de målgrupper som fortfarande är relativt osynliggjorda. Som jag visar förutsätter ett mer inkluderande angreppssätt också att hitta nya vägar och metoder i arbetet mot detta samhällsproblem.

This chapter puts children and childhoods at the forefront of critical social work by drawing on the theoretical legacy of Michel Foucault and the concept of biopolitics. While children and childhoods were not the primary focus of his work, it is argued that Foucault made significant contributions to our understanding of child welfare social work as a biopolitical discipline and practice, as well as contemporary rights discourses. The chapter examines how biopolitics reduces ‘the social’, particularly the social worlds of children, to affective ‘milieus’, stages, lives that can be intervened in from within and invested in for the future. The notion of biowelfare is used to discuss recent biopolitical articulations which focus on the malleable resilient subject as an end-goal in anticipation of a neoliberal uncertain future. The chapter proposes critical childhood studies as a useful lens for navigating a terrain in which objectification and reduction of childhoods concurrently inform rights and justice discourses, making debate and contestation challenging.

Recent political changes in Sweden are undermining social work as a human rights profession by accentuating it once again as nationalised and citizenship oriented. This commentary addresses the Tidö Agreement that immerses social work into a politics of surveillance of undocumented migrants. Writing from the perspective of a lecturer who works for internationalisation in a university setting, I provide critical reflections on what internationalisation of social work might mean in the contemporary context and outline some strategies as ways forward.

The research project is inspired by an ongoing study showing that although children and young people are central subjects to the debates on vaccine-preventable diseases, and constitute the main target of vaccines, young people are largely absent in public debates and research about vaccination-related attitudes and decision-making processes. 

In the pre-pandemic time, vaccination attitudes were commonly discussed in relation to parents’ views and decision-making processes concerning preventable “child diseases”. Despite the fact that the focus has been on parents, children have been central to arguments and practices, as both positive and negative attitudes toward immunizations may be expressed as care for children. The perspectives of children and young people themselves, particularly in relation to covid-19 vaccinations, are largely unexplored. 

In this research project, interviews will be conducted with children and young people, from the age of 12, about their views, decision-making processes and resistances in the context of covid-19 vaccinations. Focusing particularly on children and young people in Sweden whose views differ from the views of parents, health professionals or other adults, this project aims to foreground resistances in childhoods and youth in general and expand the notion of resistance in vaccination contexts in particular. Experiences from different Swedish Regional Councils and diverse procedures concerning assessments of age and maturity will be included in order to explore how young people navigate in terrains that requires adult consent and how these procedures enable but also constrain children and young people’s vaccination-related decision-making. 

This article is a critical interrogation of how gender and power figure in Swedish child welfare policy and the discourses on violence in intimate relationships vis-à-vis children exposed to violence. Drawing on feminist violence research, critical childhood studies, and intersectional perspetives, we identify a differentiation with racialised undertones in the understanding of violence as a social problem when related to children's exposure. While predominately gender-neutral discourses of social heredity and epidemiology run through the material for the seemingly 'universal' child, forms of violence ascribed to the presumed cultural Others link to gender, structural power and sexuality. The article concludes that gendered articulations of violence are restricted yet pivotal if children's exposure is to be linked to issues of inequality and power. However, when gendering interlinks with racialisation, problematic differentiations of violence, childhoods and children are produced. 

Transnational and global actors and debates largely influence social and development work in the international arena. An example of this is out-of-home childcare, where current trends show support for both deinstitutionalised options and institutionalised residential childcare, such as orphanages. Higher education international exchange programs, which may involve Social Work field placements, are, however, relatively invisible as actors supporting or opposing deinstitutionalisation and institutionalisation of Social Work. This is important to highlight considering that in the Global South, institutionalisation may be sustained by actors from the Global North, despite the fact that deinstitutionalisation is generally advocated in the Global North. Furthermore, given the rise of “voluntourism”, which has transformed formerly non-profit humanitarianism into for-profit tourism, it is crucial to investigate these collaborations and ask critical questions about the kind of Social Work that is supported. Voluntourism makes less demands on previous experience, language proficiency, duration of stay and offers tailored “internship packages”, which makes it particularly appealing to students who are looking for internships in the Global South. In addition to earlier problematisations of international exchanges between the Global North and Global South as new forms of colonialism and professional imperialism, Social Work field placements carry particular concerns. The work may in the worst case be considered to rest on the exploitation of the already vulnerable, often in the so called child orphanage industry, irregular and short-term work and a lack of solidarity and reciprocity with the local community.

Drawing on the case of an Indonesian-Swedish partnership involving the higher education and NGOs, this paper discusses how international partnerships related to Social Work can challenge unequal relations of power, changing the meaning of Social Work in the process. In particular, initiatives involving digital Social Work and follow-up work will be discussed as sustainable alternatives in a world shaped by power dynamics between the Global North and the Global South.

This article offers a rethinking of protection based on a synthesised data from Finland and Sweden on children's and mothers' experiences of post-separation stalking, and social workers' case reports on children risking exposure to gender-based violence after separation. Drawing on critical childhood studies and a feminist approach to violence and security, we ask how children's everyday lives can be incorporated in a rethinking of protection for children in post-separation contexts. Departing from identified limitations in protective solutions for children, we propose three ways of rethinking the issue of protection: (1) protection as gender- and power sensitivity, (2) protection as securitising the here and now, and (3) protection as social peace. Our findings call for some changes in professional practices, social policy and legislation.