Collective participation in child protection services: partnership or tokenism?

Abstract

This article explores how collective participation can help involve service users in the improvement of child protection services. Results from the action research project ‘User participation and professional service in the child protection services’ provide the basis for our discussion. Two of several initiatives in the project aimed at collective user participation undertaken in cooperation with two child protection centres in Norway are presented: a dialogue-based participation group for youths in child protection, and a group for parents who have lost custody of their children (the ‘User Group’). The initiative for young people resulted in changes in the practice of the child protection centre, and the User Group provided the parents with the opportunity to influence child protection services. The findings suggest that there is great need to further investigate models for collective user participation in order to provide service users with the power to influence service delivery.

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