ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on social services mediate through collaboration in cases involving suspicions of child maltreatment, and if this leads to a normative change in the family's life, and with what implications for the family's children. The social services mediation activities, which are related to the norms on collaboration, are carried out by public servants, usually professional social workers. The chapter also focuses on the normative changes in the field of social child welfare, which indicates that child protection-norms are gradually achieving an ever more prominent position. It deals with the expansion of legal norms on child protection. The trend towards the expansion of the legal child-protection norms is apparent from, among other things, stricter rules on violent and sexual crimes against children collaboration among agencies concerning children who fare badly or are at risk of faring badly, and mandatory reporting to the social services.
