Beslutsfattande kring umgänge med biologiska föräldrar vid LVU-placering : En studie om barnsekreterarens bedömningar och beslut

Sammanfattning

Titel: Decision-making surrounding contact between children in family home by coercion and biological parents: A study about the child-social workers assessment and decision-making. Children that can´t live with their parents for different reasons can be placed in a family home. Placement in Sweden can be implemented by two laws, SoL and LVU. SoL is voluntary and LVU is by coercion. When a placement is implemented, the children encounter child-social workers who will be responsible for their placement, and they will also make sure children keep in contact with their biological network if that’s possible. The purpose of this study is to examine how child-social workers plan contact between children and biological parents. The purpose is also to investigate how child-social workers make decisions regarding contact between biological parents and children in family homes according to LVU and to receive a deeper understanding of which voices is considered regarding decision-making. To delimitate the purpose three essay questions were made. The essay´s questions were answered by eleven qualitative semi-structured interviews with twelve child-social workers. Prominent findings shows that individual assessments were crucial for decision-making regarding contact. Another important part of the job was continuous contact with coworkers and management to be able to discuss different cases. The study also shows that most of the child-social workers see many difficulties regarding decision-making of children´s contact with their biological parents. The thing that all the child-social workers agreed on though was that the child´s best and the child´s voice is the primary focus regarding contact. Except for the child´s voice, child-social workers mentioned the biological parents voice, the family home, the school, preschool, children and youth psychiatry, the network, and other parts of the social services. Child-social workers describe that the contact is planned based of the child´s needs and that risk and protective factors always must be taking in to account to determinate if it´s safe for the child. Finally, the child-social workers highlighted different protective measures to secure safe contact for the children. Keywords: Social work, contact, family home, LVU, decision-making