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Abstract
Sweden has a long tradition of using ordinary people, often named laypersons, as supportive persons within the area of social services. One of the most popular interventions is to support children and teenagers by using a volunteer contact family (CF) or contact person (CP). The intervention was introduced in the Social Services Act, implemented in 1982, and at present about 19,000 young persons in Sweden have this intervention. In practice, it is regarded as two interventions, CF and CP. The article will only deal with CPs for teenagers. Despite this is a very popular intervention, there is a lack of knowledge about how it works and has developed during these three decades. Research dealing with the CP intervention takes partly contradictory views. Qualitative studies often stress positive experiences of all categories involved, while a comprehensive quantitative study recently presented results, indicating that the intervention seemed to increase the risk of being placed in out-of-home care in the future. The aim of the article is to explore and illustrate how the CP intervention works today in relation to the original intensions in law and which types of persons that are appointed for the CP assignments. The impact of the professional development in social work will be discussed in the analysis. The results will tell us something about the progress and development of the intervention but also the organisational context in which social services exist in Sweden today.
Notes
1. National Board of Health and Welfare, Citation2013.
2. Title: ‘CF/-Person for Children. Follow up and Evaluation of Register Data’. Based on longitudinal register data on more than 950,000 children.
3. The project title is ‘Society as a teenage parent – about CPs in the social services’. Financed by FORTE (Swedish Research Council for Health, Working life and Welfare). The overall purpose was to obtain knowledge about what content is included when the social services decide to appoint a CP for a teenager. The study also deals with the position of voluntary work in social legislation in Sweden.
5. Information brochure from Kriminalvårdsstyrelsen (the Swedish Prison and Probation Service).
6. SKL (Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions) provide a recommendation of fees that most municipalities follow.
7. Section 22, the Care of Young Persons Act (1980/2007).
8. The CP approach is also used in the Act concerning Support and Service for Persons with Certain Functional Impairments (LSS). As it is provided for a different target group this intervention will not be discussed in this article. More information at http://www.socialstyrelsen.se/lists/Artikelkatalog/Attachments/8407/2009-126-188_2009126188.pdf (page 2, point 4).
9. It is important to note that the register studies are based on children and mothers; fathers are not included.
10. One municipality is part of a large city (one of ten city districts), the others are smaller and one has a more rural character.
11. The social services in each municipality invited persons who had experience as CPs but also persons from school and psychiatry who often worked with adolescents with CPs.
12. In each case, we have used the investigation from social services, including background facts, family situation, defined problems, motives of the proposed intervention, etc.
13. In one municipality, the whole year of 2009 was included due to the fact that there were too few cases with new CPs during the first part of 2009.
14. A more detailed presentation of the documentary study will be included in another article by Helena Johansson (in preparation).
15. See information about specially advanced CPs 4.
16. Report from the National Board of Health and Welfare Citation2013 (Forkby and Larsson Citation2007) based on 20 municiplities.
17. Only assistance has to be registered and will be possible to use in research statistics.