ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns itself with the child welfare service’s follow-up of children who are placed outside the home. In particular, I focus on the child welfare service’s implementation of Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, on children’s right to express themselves in administrative and legal proceedings concerning them. Central to the chapter is a study of how the child’s right to express himself in his own case relates to the concept of relationship in the child welfare service’s follow-up of children placed in foster homes and emergency homes. The starting point for the discussions is that the child welfare service’s obligation to fulfil Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child is indisputable and that the child is a bearer of rights. At the same time, the institutional framework for social workers’ fulfilment of Article 12 is that this requirement meets a complex reality. In considering those complex realities, it is often difficult to see how social workers may realise the child’s right, given existing institutional frameworks limited by time and task, in particular as the fulfilment of rights connects intimately with the establishment of a secure relationship between the child and the social worker. In other words, children’s rights to express themselves in their own case during follow-up in a foster home is a right that can easily be overlooked or put under pressure by caseworkers and supervisors in busy bureaucracies.
