Children’s and parents’ involvement in care order proceedings: a cross-national comparison of judicial decision-makers’ views and experiences

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the views of judicial decision-makers (n = 1794) in four child protection jurisdictions (England, Finland, Norway, and the USA (California)), about whether parents and children are provided with appropriate opportunities to participate in proceedings in their countries. Overall, the study found a high degree of agreement within and between the countries as regards the important conditions for parents’ and children´s involvement, although the four systems themselves are very different. There was less agreement about children’s involvement than parents’, and the court decision-makers from Norway and Finland were more likely to express doubts about this. Nevertheless, the main message from the judicial decision-makers is that they are relatively satisfied as to how parents’ and children´s involvement is handled in their countries. Whether or not this confidence is justified, the emphasis on achieving effective involvement of children and parents in court proceedings is likely to grow, with major implications for the workers, decision-makers and agencies involved.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s and parents’ participation
• cross-country study
• judicial decision-makers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Project number 217115.

2. An association of judges in California was responsible for survey distribution and could not provide a definitive number of judges who might have been offered participation in the survey. Some counties have referee judges who work for Superior Court judges and we cannot determine exactly how many of these might have been given the survey to complete.

3. The confidence interval, simply put, informs us about how confident we can be that the survey results reported reflects what would be found if the whole sample population were studied. A confidence interval of 99% is a strict standard.