ABSTRACT
Everyone in social work practice, theory and research knows how difficult it is for social workers to advocate for children's rights from the perspective of the child. The desired principle, wish and need to work and speak from the 'child perspective' can easily lapse into speaking about adults and prioritising their rights instead of the rights of the child. This was most blatantly shown within the feminist social work perspective, which pointed out cases of domestic violence where social workers in the past, to 'protect' the rights of the adult, exposed the child to continuous psychological or even physical abuse without reali~,ing that the child's rights were being violated. In these cases the child's perspective was not taken into consideration (Walker, 1992; Mullender and Morley, 1994). This is often still the case in Central and Eastern European social work practice where a feminist social work perspective has been marginalised in favour of traditional familialistic approaches often expressed as 'better a violent parent then no parent' (Zavirsek, 1994), a practice that prioritises the family above the individual household members.
