What is child protection? Historical and methodological issues in comparative research on lastensuojelu/child protection

Abstract

This article addresses comparative research on what has come to be called, in (British) English, ‘child protection’ or, rather differently, in Finnish ‘lastensuojelu’. In developing a cross-national research project on lastensuojelu/child protection practices in England and Finland, we found it necessary to go back a few steps, to address what might usually be considered as ‘background issues’. This article discusses the welfare state traditions in both countries, especially with respect to families and children, in order to contextualise the focus of ongoing qualitative research on micro comparisons. When comparing the mundane practices of child protection and the ways problems and clienthoods are constructed, as in this study, historical, social, cultural and linguistic issues matter. Indeed, very basic concepts such as ‘child protection’ and ‘child protection case’ become problematic in the comparison.

Full text

Int J Soc Welfare 2004: 13: 28–41
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare 2004.
28
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL OF
SOCIAL WELFARE
ISSN 1369-6866
Hearn J, Pösö T, Smith C, White S, Korpinen J. What is child
protection? Historical and methodological issues in comparative
research on lastensuojelu/child protection
Int J Soc Welfare 2004: 13: 28–41 © Blackwell Publishing,
2004.
This article addresses comparative research on what has come
to be called, in (British) English, ‘child protection’ or, rather
differently, in Finnish ‘lastensuojelu’. In developing a cross-
national research project on lastensuojelu/child protection prac-
tices in England and Finland, we found it necessary to go
back a few steps, to address what might usually be considered
as ‘background issues’. This article discusses the welfare state
traditions in both countries, especially with respect to families
and children, in order to contextualise the focus of ongoing
qualitative research on micro comparisons. When comparing
the mundane practices of child protection and the ways prob-
lems and clienthoods are constructed, as in this study, histor-
ical, social, cultural and linguistic issues matter. Indeed, very
basic concepts such as ‘child protection’ and ‘child protection
case’ become problematic in the comparison.
Jeff Hearn1,4, Tarja Pösö2, Carole Smith3,
Sue White4, Johanna Korpinen2
1 Swedish School of Economics, Helsinki
2 University of Manchester
3 University of Tampere, Helsinki
4 University of Huddersfield
Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKIJSWInternational Journal of Socical Welfare1369-6866© Blackwell Publishers Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare 200420041311000
Original Articles
What is child protection?Hearn et al.
What is child protection? Historical
and methodological issues in
comparative research on
lastensuojelu/child protection
Key words: children, child protection, child welfare, comparative
studies, history of childhood, qualitative research
Jeff Hearn, Swedish School of Economics, P O Box 479, FIN-
00101 Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: jeff.hearn@hanken.fi
Accepted for publication January 12, 2003
Introduction
This article concerns comparative research on what has
come to be called, in (British) English, ‘child protection’.
In developing a comparative cross-national research pro-
ject on child protection practices in England and Finland,
we found it necessary to go back a few steps, to address
what are usually considered as ‘background issues’.
Instead, we found it necessary to bring to the fore both
the broad historical background and the context of the
welfare state in the two countries. Developing compara-
tive research without exploration of these questions is
likely to remain at a level of only broad brushstrokes.
We thus provide some guidelines for others conducting
similar cross-national research studies.
Comparative research perspectives
Recent years have seen a boom in comparative research
on social welfare. This has been inspired by regional
changes, including within the EU information tech-
nologies, and political economic changes including
neo-liberal application of policies across countries. Com-
parative research can be pursued for many reasons: to
gather basic empirical data; to test whether theories
developed in one context can be applied to another; to
develop more comprehensive models; to examine the
influence of cultural conditions; and to feed into
transnational policy development, such as EU policy
(Pringle, 1998). Much comparative research on social
welfare has been rather macro in focus, such as com-
paring welfare states or social security systems (Duncan,
1994; Esping-Andersen, 1990; Sainsbury, 1994). Some of
the research has focused on social services or social
care services (Anttonen & Sipilä, 1996; Sipilä, 1997).
There is much to be gained by doing comparative
research on social welfare to explore the activities and
functions of social work and social workers, to re-examine
the relationship between the state and the third sector
and to rethink definitions and boundaries of particular
services, both within social work and between social
work, health and criminal justice systems. Comparative
research assists the critical re-evaluation of understandings
of ‘children’ and ‘adults’, and their powers and relation-
ships. In social work, the comparative focus has often
been on training, welfare systems or the gathering of
national reports on selected themes (Virtanen, 1994),
sometimes in a ‘European’ frame (Armstrong & Hollows,
1991; Harder & Pringle, 1997; Hill, 1997; Lorenz, 1994).
Comparative studies specifically relevant to ‘child protec-
tion’ include those on system aims (Harder & Pringle,
1997; Virtanen, 1994; see also Hetherington, 1998 on

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the use of vignettes to compare the translation of
administrative frameworks into action); those focusing
on combating child abuse (Armstrong & Hollows, 1991;
Gilbert, 1997; Korpinen, 1995); descriptions of child pro-
tection from written research reports (Barth, 1992;
Weightman & Weightman, 1995); examinations of
child protection as part of social work and/or social
work education (Cannan, Berry & Lyons, 1992; Lorenz,
1994); and studies of child policy more generally
(Millar & Warman, 1996; Pringle, 1998; Therborn, 1993).
Such studies raise questions about notions of ‘children’
and their relations to family and state.
There are several possible major difficulties in such
comparative research. These include practical and empirical
problems, such as obtaining comparable empirical data.
Cultural and linguistic problems include how descriptions
depend on the writers’ national, cultural writing style
and linguistic understanding, so that comparisons are
not only of systems but also of linguistic and cultural
practices. Administrative and statistical systems usually
do not correspond with each other; for example, Finnish
‘open care’ has no exact UK equivalent. More theoretical
issues include how researchers may use, more or less
consciously, different theoretical models and assump-
tions in different societal contexts. There are dangers in
reifying nation or society at the expense of, say, region.
The familiarity of researchers with other researchers’
systems varies greatly; generally, British researchers are
much less familiar with the Finnish system than vice
versa.
While much comparative research has focused on
macro comparisons and the pursuit of an objectivist notion
of truth, our approach is informed more by a critical
realist approach in which everyday meanings are taken
seriously and located within the context of historical
material change. Indeed, research showing what child
welfare interventions and child protection are as practical
everyday activities is rather rare. In the UK there has
been a strong orientation toward outcome research and
less concern with the nature of professional practice
and organisational processes in doing such work.
The comparative research study: lastensuojelu and
child protection
The comparative research in question is the collaborative
study – ‘The Lastensuojelu/Child Protection, Family and
the State Research Project’ – undertaken by researchers
in Finland and England to explore the operation of the
child protection and child welfare systems in the two
countries. The decision to study and compare these two
very different European countries grew out of established
university teaching and student-exchange links under
the European Union’s ERASMUS and subsequently
SOCRATES programmes. These academic contacts
showed clearly that the assumptions, practices and
meanings of social policy, social work, child welfare
interventions, and specifically lastensuojelu and child
protection, differed between the two countries. In contrast
to much previous research, our research has focused on
the detailed practices, definitions, classifications and
management of formal involvements with children, their
parents and significant family members in the form of
‘cases’ and other contacts.1 In these practices social
workers are acting within particular institutional contexts
that are informed by childcare policy, local policy inter-
pretation, professionals’ concerns and legislative require-
ments. Their forms of thought, routines and practices
are influenced by larger, more collective representations
of appropriate interventions and competent practice.
Social workers’ accounts are assumed to have central
importance in understanding the process and legitimation
of social work practice, consequences of intervention
for children and families and the institutional context
within which social workers make sense of their practice.
However, somewhat paradoxically, to make sense of these
practices, we have taken a step back to examine how
they themselves are located within broader developments
regarding family and state. The comparison shows some
of the complexity and variability behind broad-brush com-
parisons of Nordic and ‘neo-liberal’ welfare systems.
The present study has a number of main features. It
compares a neo-liberal system (England) with a Nordic
system (Finland); it focuses on both family welfare
services and a particular aspect of the welfare system;
it examines contemporary concrete practices rather than
generalised comparisons; it takes into account recent
changes in welfare systems in both countries that could
complicate overly simplified contrasts; it combines
historical and qualitative methodologies; it raises com-
plex questions about language use and concepts; and it
locates these comparative studies within their specific
historical contexts. The study may seem to be about
child protection, but paradoxically it is not, for immedi-
ately there are problems of language and contrasting
traditions. Before going any further, let us address a
basic question: Why do we refer to ‘Lastensuojelu/
Child Protection’ in the title of our project? While we
build on broad comparative analyses, we use a somewhat
different approach. We highlight the question: what is,
and what is meant by, child protection? The Finnish
1‘The Lastensuojelu/Child Protection, Family and the State
Research Project’ builds on the contextual work set out here.
It is a study in both countries following social work
intervention over six months from referral or identification
of work with a particular family with children. It comprises
interviews with social workers at the point of referral and
then six months later, and examination of case records.
Twenty such interventions have been examined in each
country. Our focus is the construction of the nature and
causation of clients’ problems and what are seen as
‘appropriate’ responses, that is social workers’ ‘sense-
making’ activities (Wattam, 1997).

Hearn et al.
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© Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare 2004
word lastensuojelu is usually translated in English as
child protection or child welfare. However, from our
experience, we have been unable to, or unwilling to,
squeeze the Finnish and English conceptualisations
into the phrase ‘child protection’, with its various local
meanings. A central issue is not only to compare national
systems, but also to ascertain what is meant by child
protection/lastensuojelu in different cultural settings. Such
different meanings can be understood within the context
of historical change and the different ways welfare and
state intervention on behalf of children and families
have developed.
According to the Finnish Child Welfare Act of 1983,
lastensuojelu covers all children in society, and its
effects should extend to school, health services, housing
and building design, the family and culture. In England,
child welfare means to safeguard and promote the
welfare of children, especially children in need. Our
discussions have confirmed that lastensuojelu and child
protection cannot be translated as equivalent as such
because the ideologies and expectations behind these
terms are themselves not equivalent. When Finns talk
of ‘child protection’ and attempt to conceptualise child
protection in England, they have certain expectations in
mind, in terms of lastensuojelu, that cannot be erased.
The same goes the other way around for British people
seeking to understand lastensuojelu. Something extra
is added or something vital is left out when we think
about English child protection or Finnish lastensuojelu
through the eyes of the other, no matter how much
information we have on the other’s system. However,
this does not mean that we cannot discuss or do
research on the same theme or phenomenon called child
protection or lastensuojelu.
Furthermore, we have attempted to utilise the dif-
ficulties that arise from having two different systems
under study. Even by looking at the basic laws regulating
English child protection and Finnish lastensuojelu, one
finds basic differences. The UK Children Act 1989
comprises 211 pages, whereas the corresponding Finnish
Child Welfare Act comprises only eight. If so many, or
so few, words are needed to say what is essential about
child protection, can we expect to use one concept to
define both? It seems unlikely. However, for practical
reasons, such as easing communication, we have often
used the concept of ‘child protection’ as shorthand for
our research topic. By using both concepts, as in the
title of this article, we emphasise differences, difficulties
and dilemmas. Despite these, we can and are researching
the phenomenon often called ‘child protection’. We have
sought to use the difficulties that arise from studying
two different systems as positive indications of dif-
ference. Thus, some of the methodological problems
encountered can be understood as preliminary results
(Hearn & Parkin, 1987: 48–49). To make sense of these
differences and difficulties, we have found it necessary
to look back at the very different welfare histories of
the two countries. When approached this way, very
different stories are told; we walk, as it were, along very
different tracks.
The historical contexts of the welfare state in Finland
and the UK
Child welfare and child protection take place in the
context of more general state, welfare, social and
economic policies. While both the UK and Finland
could be said to be ‘welfare states’, the form they have
taken shows significant differences (Hearn, 2002). There
have been many attempts in recent times to theorise
the differences between welfare state forms, especially
so in comparative work on Europe, North America and
Australia. The most widely cited framework is that of
Esping-Andersen (1990, 1996) who compared conservative
corporatist, liberal or neo-liberal, and social democratic
or Scandinavian régimes. On this basis, the UK is an
example of the second and Finland the third, although
it is not strictly part of Scandinavia. This approach has
been widely critiqued and developed further (Duncan,
2000; O’Connor, 1993; Orloff, 1996; Ostner, 1994;
Pringle, 1998). A major area of debate has been gender
and retheorising welfare states rather than ‘adding
gender on’. Lewis (1992) and Rubery, Smith and Turner
(1996) differentiate between strong-, modified- and
weak-breadwinner welfare states, exemplified by
Ireland, France and Sweden, respectively. Finland fits
the weak-breadwinner model; the UK has strong-
breadwinner traditions but also an individualised tax
system, a household-based benefit system and, until
the 1998 budget, little state help with childcare. To under-
stand the differences between the two welfare states,
examination of the very different histories of the two
states is necessary.
The British case is of an imperial state power that
even by the late 19th century was in the process of adjusting
to threats to its industrial and military supremacy,
especially from the USA and Germany. From the early
20th century there was a progressive transformation of
the imperial British state, not least through wars and
post-war reconstructions, towards one that could be
characterised as a welfare state geared to assisting the
(re)production of healthier national citizens. While state
intervention increased hugely during the 20th century,
overstating any would-be collectivism of British social
policy would be mistaken. This becomes all the more
apparent when one compares the UK situation with that
elsewhere in Europe, especially the Nordic region.
Despite the partial success of the collectivist project
of the post-World War II Labour Government, particu-
larly in industrial nationalisation, when placed in a
broader context the British welfare state can be seen as
more fundamentally residual (Titmuss, 1958; Tyyskä,

What is child protection?
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1995; Wilensky & Lebeaux, 1958). The 1942 Beveridge
Report was a social insurance scheme that was not
part of a revolutionary or socialist project; it was also
a bestseller, enjoying wide political support. Family
allowances, as Beveridge recommended, were one of the
last measures of the National Coalition Government.
With the end of the war, both the Conservative and Labour
parties promised social reforms; it was the latter elected
into government that implemented a welfare programme
through the National Insurance (1946), National Assistance
(1948) and National Health Service Acts (1946).
This post-war welfare relative consensus has been
challenged ever since the late 1970s with the advent of
Thatcherism and the movement toward more clearly
liberal-conservative policies. The British welfare state
has shifted to a more diverse combination of different
public agencies, some providing direct services, some
involved in regulatory and deregulatory activity, some
engaged in mixing public, private and third-sector
provision. The avowed governmental policy of ‘rolling
back the state’ involved in practice greater centralisation
of state power and large growth in expenditure on income
maintenance.
The Finnish state has a very different history. For
most of the 19th century, from 1809 onwards, it ceased
to be a part of Sweden and became a Grand Duchy, an
internally separate part, of the Russian Empire. This
paradoxically guaranteed some qualified autonomy, as
well as the continuation of the Swedish social order,
including the Lutheran Church, Swedish Law, its own
constitutional system and government by Finns. This
incidentally was seen in Russia as a ‘punishment’ to
Sweden, Britain’s ally. Beginning in the 1860s, Finland
had a four-estate parliament, and nationalism more gener-
ally grew. By the late 19th century, Finnish opposition
to Russian rule was expressed in demands for greater
human rights. General suffrage was introduced in 1907;
by 1916 the Socialists won a majority in parliament.
The process of gaining independence from Russia
culminated in 1917. In January 1918 the Socialists
created a ‘Red’ Administration in Helsinki, leading to
the Civil War or the War of Independence (depending
on one’s perspective), which was won by the ‘White’
(right-wing) forces by the following May. Antagonism
between these two sectors of Finnish society – the left
and the right – had ‘a long-term impact on the political,
cultural and ideological atmosphere in Finland’ (Tuomisto
& Vuori-Karvia, 1997: 83), especially during the 1920s
and 1930s. The Finnish constitution dates from 1919.
While Finland is a ‘young’ nation, it maintains much
longer traditions established from both its Swedish and
Russian, and indeed rural, pasts. As with other Nordic
nations with their small and culturally relatively
homogenous populations, Finland developed a form
of democracy involving a specific, positive relation
between citizen and state. State and civil society
merge much more closely than in much of Europe. In
such governance, ‘[p]eople are used to organising but
their idea is to act on behalf of their issues through
the state, to pressure “the state to do something”’
(Rantalaiho, 1996: 23).
Finnish industrialisation came late, initially from
about the 1870s, shortly before Britain had begun a
period of relative industrial decline on the world stage,
which in some respects is still going on. In Finland
women’s relatively high participation in the labour market
and trade unions and the development of governmental
welfare intervention were part of the early 20th-century
system. Governmental financial support to childcare
centres dates from 1913, and legislation on financial
support to kindergartens or childcare centres from 1923
(Tyyskä, 1995: 31). However, the modern welfare state
dates from the post-World War II period. Kuusipalo
(1990: 16) reports:
During the war women took the main responsibility
for farming and the production of industry as well
as for the continuity of civil life and thus they were
breaking the division of labour between the sexes. At
the end of World War II more than half of the Finnish
industrial labour force consisted of women.
After the war Finnish women kept these jobs and did
not ‘return to the home’ (Rantalaiho, 1996: 26), as was
the case in some European countries (Riley, 1983).
Simonen (1990: 62) notes that the ‘decade of the
1940s has been called the decade of family policy’.
With a coalition government of the Agrarian and Social
Democratic parties, reformism and building a welfare
state were part of a national consensus, both during and,
following those traumatic national experiences, after
the war. The 1950s and 1960s saw rapid industrial-
isation, with growing electronic industries, movement
from rural areas into towns and cities, and welfare state
development. This meant that ‘Finland went almost
directly from an agricultural to a modern service’
(Rantalaiho, 1996: 22) or ‘postindustrial society’ (Husu
& Niemelä, 1993: 60). The modernisation of welfare
in Finland has been through a more social democratic
form than the British case. It has also developed as a
partly egalitarian patriarchy (Schunter-Kleeman, 1992:
145), or on the basis of a dual role contract rather than
an equality contract (Duncan, 1994; Hirdman, 1990). The
welfare state has to some extent been under retreat in
the 1990s, shortly after the post-war ‘welfare consensus’
was broken in the UK.
Placing child welfare in a comparative, historical
context
Let us now focus specifically on the development of the
child welfare systems in the two countries. While our
main concern is with lastensuojelu/child protection, it

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is useful to consider the general question of the relations
between children, family and state. An influential work
in this respect is Therborn’s (1993) analysis of the
relationship between the development of children’s
rights and the forms of legal patriarchy that existed at
the beginning of the 20th century, and to some extent
still persist. He classifies children’s rights into three
categories: the child-centred family (equal parental
rights and the paramount principle of best interests of
the child); equality between children of married and
non-married parents; and integrity (restraints on child
abuse by parents). He also discussed the historical
timing of reforms in these areas, suggesting that
change for children’s rights occurred first in the Nordic
countries, then the English-speaking countries, fol-
lowed by the Germanic countries, then the Southern
European countries. However, this general pattern is
not altogether borne out by our comparison of Finland
and England – at least not in any simple way. Inter-
estingly, according to Therborn, fertility is lowest in
those countries that have a long tradition of ‘protecting
males from the consequences of their sexuality at the
expense of the rights of children’ (1993: 263, cited
in McDonald, 2000: 6). This would now be very
questionable with relatively high rates of fertility in,
for example, Sweden and Finland, compared with the
relatively low rates in, for example, Italy.
Millar and Warman (1996) began their survey of
patterns of partnering by outlining three main groupings
in Europe in a somewhat different way: Scandinavian/
Anglo; Mediterranean/Irish; and Central (European).
In the first group are found moderate to relatively high
fertility rates, relatively high numbers of lone parents,
and relatively high employment of women, compared
with other parts of Europe. However, in contrast to this
framework, when the situation of parenting and child
welfare is looked at in more detail, there are clear
differences between Finland and the UK, particularly in
terms of the development of state services and related
provisions (Table 1). In general terms a contrast may
be drawn between a neo-liberal, modified male bread-
winner ‘welfare state’ in the UK and a social democratic,
weaker male breadwinner welfare state in Finland.
These different systems involve different relations
between children, adults, women and men, mothers and
fathers, and the family to welfare and the state.
These contrasts further suggest that the policies and
practices of lastensuojelu/child protection are likely to
be rather different in the two countries. In thinking about
how to conceptualise possible differences between English
child protection and Finnish lastensuojelu, we found
Weightman and Weightman’s (1995) review of the
contrasts between child welfare and social work in Eng-
land and Sweden very useful in the early stages of our
research. Their analysis helped to spell out how some
of the generalised comparisons between the English
and Finnish welfare systems might work out in terms
of the more specific relation of child welfare and social
work, and the professional practices of social workers.
Weightman and Weightman focus both on differences
in social work practices and cultural differences that
underpin professional practice. There are some social
work practices in Sweden that would be inoperable
within the UK culture, just as there are those in England
Table 1. Patterns of policy in Finland and the UK in the mid-1990s.
Finland UK
Obligations to maintain children after divorce
Parents can decide Yes No
Any payment guaranteed Yes No
Benefits for parents
Child benefit Yes Yes
Lone-parent benefit Yes Yes
Child maintenance guarantee Yes No
Parental leave Yes No
Paternity leave Paid No
Leave to care for sick children Yes No
Other care provisions Yes No
Length of maternity and parental leave in
months after birth of each child
36 7 (maternity
leave only
Care of pre-school age children
Nursery/kindergarten provision High Low
Infants and very young children: how targeted Extensive, universal Limited, at risk
Regulation of day care Yes Yes
Publicly funded childcare for ages 0–3:
percentage of age group covered
21 2
Tax system Individualised Individualised
Benefit system Individualised Individualised
Sources: Millar & Warman, 1996; Rubery et al., 1996.

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that would seem to be hopelessly inadequate in the
Swedish context (p. 80).
They point out that there are more than just
differences in social work practices; rather it is the very
cultural legitimacy and social support for social work
practices and interventions that differ: ‘in many respects,
what is normal and typical in Sweden would be experi-
enced as intolerable in England. The same is true if
social work practices in England were imaginatively
superimposed on Sweden’ ( p. 76). In brief, these dif-
ferences include the focus in England (and in the UK
more generally) on child abuse, reactive social work and
social services, and a surveillant, non-interventionist
relation of the state to citizens and families, as compared
with the focus in Sweden on general child welfare (rather
than child abuse), preventive social work and social
services, and a more integrated, more interventionist
relation of the state to citizens and families. Although
there are dangers in overstating or oversimplying dif-
ferences, and there have been important welfare contro-
versies in both countries, in Sweden there has been a
‘wider willingness to intervene in people’s private lives
for their own good’ (Gould, 1988: 12) (see Rantalaiho,
1996: 23) in a way that would be severely resisted in
the UK, unless ‘things go wrong’ (Parton, 1985: 127).
These observations have made us cautious in transferring
concepts from one country to the other in too simple a
way. Thus, it is necessary to provide a historical outline
of how the different child welfare systems have developed
in England and Finland.
England
Historical background
The 19th-century relation of social work and its manage-
ment to child abuse was contradictory: distance and
fascination, concern for and fear of the dangerous
labouring classes (Ferguson, 1990). The codifying 1908
Children Act repealed 21 other Acts and parts of 17
more, and led to the appointment of infant life protection
workers and the formal delegation of state powers to
the NSPCC. The 1911 Act set out the basic scheme for
contributory national insurance with a fundamental link
between state and family rather than the individual. This
was extended to all citizens following the 1942 Social
Insurance and Allied Services (Beveridge) Report with
the 1946 National Insurance Act and the 1948 National
Assistance Act. The 1948 Children Act set up Children’s
Departments to promote the protection and welfare of
children; these received additional powers in the 1960s
for the care of children brought before the courts for
offending. The Social Services Act 1970 created unified
Social Services Departments, superseding the Children’s
Departments. Paradoxically, this unification of function,
emphasising family models, integrated and systemic
interventions and community-need models, was the
period of increasing prioritisation of social workers’
tasks towards child abuse and child protection.
Subsequently, social work with children and families
has become more focused and specialised (Department
of Health and Social Security (DHSS), 1974, 1980), so
it is now concerned not with child welfare generally,
but with ‘child protection’ specifically (Howe, 1994a,
1994b; Parton, 1991). The discretion of social workers
has been curtailed through intensification of formal
monitoring, so that cases are now routinely processed
in a ‘legalistic’ fashion, with a preoccupation with their
forensic, evidential features. With such an emphasis on
legalism:
the rule of law as judged by the court takes priority
at the expense of other considerations, including
that which may be deemed by the professionals as
optimally therapeutic or ‘in the best interests of the
child’. (Parton, 1991: 194, emphasis added)
This legalism is purported to have displaced psychologistic,
psychodynamic and therapeutic ways of understanding
family problems.
Risk and the regulation of social work assessment
One indication of this increasing concern has been the
series of official inquiries into child deaths and the
(mis)conduct of social workers and other professionals.
Between 1970 and 1985 there were 35 such inquiries,
of which the most famous were those into the deaths
of Maria Colwell (1974), Jasmine Beckford (London
Borough of Brent, 1985), Tyra Henry (London Borough
of Lambeth, 1987) and Kimberley Carlile (London
Borough of Greenwich, 1987). In these inquiries, social
workers were criticised for failing to recognise the
‘signs and symptoms’ of abuse, and for concentrating
instead on maintaining their relationship with parents.
The main models for interventions with children were
becoming based on problematic, individual cases
assessed through risk, dangerousness and need for
registration rather than community preventative models.
These inquiries reinforced the belief that child abuse
tragedies were preventable and that the imperative was
to perfect criteria for sorting out dangerous families from
others. Physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists and social
work academics set about creating the taxonomy of
dangerousness. Dale, Davies, Morrison and Waters’ (1986)
work on ‘dangerous families’ informed the Depart-
ment of Health publication Protecting Children (Depart-
ment of Health (DoH), 1988), known by social workers
as ‘the orange book’. The Department of Health and
Social Security also produced Wo rking Together (DHSS,
1988, revised by the Department of Health, 1991a),
detailing prescriptions for inter-agency working. These
measures sought to protect children from ‘inter-agency

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dangerousness’ (DoH, 1988: 13) by ensuring that signi-
ficant details were passed between agencies, and also
safeguarding parents, as each agency would be a check
on the others. The role of the police in child abuse cases
was formalised and ‘joint’ police and social services
investigations of ‘serious’ (potentially criminal) cases
became the norm.
Once the essential ingredients of competent assess-
ment had been identified, it became possible to create
bureaucratic mechanisms to check whether they had
been properly carried out. These procedures soon became
ends in themselves. Despite growing recognition that
dangerousness was difficult to predict (Dingwall, 1989),
professional practice was subject to managerial and
judicial scrutiny as though it were an objective and
measurable process. So, if things went wrong, there
must be a fault in procedures or professional assess-
ments, with a pervasive assumption that a child’s death
must be because of the failure of an individual practi-
tioner or the ‘child protection system’.
There has also been a growing concern for child sexual
abuse, informed by increased awareness of sexuality,
survivors’ accounts and feminist theory and practice. In
1986 Childline, the national telephone helpline, was set
up as an extension of the rights discourse on children’s
rights. This was in the British context rather novel as
the ‘rights’ of parents and teachers to inflict corporal
punishment on children had long been defended. The
UK was the last European nation to abolish corporal
punishment in state schools, in 1988. In 1987 the Cleve-
land controversy erupted, highlighting the possible
widespread scale of sexual abuse in what were por-
trayed as ‘ordinary families’ and leading to a backlash
against social workers’ intervention in families. In 1988
the Butler-Sloss Report and no fewer than seven govern-
mental circulars were issued in the wake of the con-
troversy, dealing mainly, though not only, with child
sexual abuse. They were directed to social workers,
doctors, teachers, nurses, midwives and health visitors,
and Home Office services, and stressed inter-agency
cooperation. The 1988 Protecting Children document
set out guidelines for assessment of children in relation
to every possible form of abuse, and noted the signi-
ficance of cultural variations and perspectives.
The 1989 Children Act, together with the nine supple-
mentary volumes of guidance, consolidated policy and
practice, gave local authorities a general duty to safeguard
and promote the welfare of children in their area, through
Area Child Protection Committees. It introduced the
concept of ‘significant harm’ into public law proceedings
on the welfare of children (Adcock & White, 1998;
Smith, 1994). The Act used the notion of significant harm
to differentiate between children who are ‘in need’ of
family support services and those who require protection
(DoH, 1991b). For instance, regarding an application
for a Care Order, the Act decrees that ‘a court may
make a care order or supervision order if it is satisfied
that the child is suffering, or is likely to suffer,
significant harm’ (section 31(2)), and ‘harm’ means ill-
treatment or the impairment of health or development;
‘development’ means physical, intellectual, emotional,
social or behavioural development; ‘health’ means
physical or mental health; and ‘ill-treatment’ includes
sexual abuse and forms of treatment that are not
physical (section 31(9), emphasis added).
Clearly the concepts ‘harm’ and ‘impairment’ are
contestable. They have been the subject of debate
amongst legal scholars (for example, Law Commission,
1995: 252–256):
Since ‘causing harm’ entails by its very meaning that
the action is prima facie wrong, it is a normative
concept acquiring its specific meaning from the
moral theory within which it is embedded. Without
such a moral theory the harm principle is a formal
principle lacking specific concrete content. (Raz,
1986: 414, citation Law Commission, 1995: 253–254)
Judgements about ‘significant harm’, or decisions about
whether a child is ‘in need’, are just that; they rely upon
the assumption that objective measures exist against
which ‘development’ and standards of parenting can be
evaluated. The categorisations that the law demands
continue to depend on the seductive certainties of formal
knowledge, particularly developmentalism, which were
transformed into practice via the ‘the orange book’ and
more recently the Framework for Assessment (DoH,
2000). However, the opacity of the terms ‘reasonable’
and ‘significant’ amplifies the role of ‘experts’ in their
interpretation and definition. Since the late 1980s there
have been further developments in a series of exposés
of residential care, paedophile, organised, ritual and
satanic abuse, still widening the concerns of social
workers.
From concern about dangerousness to concern about
concern?
Towards the mid-1990s substantial discursive shifts
were taking place. Research (for example, DoH, 1995a;
Thorpe, 1994) suggested that, although many children
entered the child protection system, the vast majority
were not placed on child protection registers, and that
once the child protection investigation was complete,
they were unlikely to receive ‘family support’ services,
to which they were entitled (Audit Commission, 1995).
The child protection system itself became an object of
concern (Stainton Rogers & Stainton Rogers, 1992).
The principle of ‘partnership’ with parents, central
to the guidance and regulations issued after the Children
Act 1989, was stressed, with practice guidance issued
on the ‘challenge’ of partnership in child protection
(DoH, 1995b). However, whilst the rationale of this

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35
guide was the apparent intrinsic incompatibility be-
tween professional surveillance (with the implicit threat
of coercive intervention) and ‘partnership’ with parents,
the orange book, with its transparent discourse of
dangerousness, remains the recommended format for
‘comprehensive assessment’. This sorting of dangerous
cases from others means that social workers cannot
‘soften’ their approach to child protection without
risking personal culpability (White, 1996, 1997).
There is some evidence (White, 1997) that identifica-
tion of dangerousness, making surveillance of families
a central function of childcare workers, remains dominant
despite the ‘child protection versus family support debate’
spawned by critical studies in the 1990s. The durability
of this form of practice in the face of trenchant criticism
is best understood as the product of several factors: the
judiciary is bestowed with the power to define and judge
practice; in turn they have drawn on the knowledge of the
‘psy’ professions ( psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians)
to give their judgements powerful rhetorical force; with
the substantial retrenchment of services, social workers
and managers have used notions of dangerousness to
ration increasingly scarce resources.
Significant research on child protection has been
commissioned by the Department of Health in response
to public anxiety about the level and effectiveness of
professional intervention, often characterised as too
little and too late, or overly zealous and unnecessarily
disruptive of family relationships. Twenty studies were
completed under this programme, and their findings
summarised with a view to informing better professional
practice (DoH, 1995a). The greatest impact of the research
programme concerns outcomes of child protection inter-
ventions (Cleaver & Freeman, 1995; Farmer & Owen,
1995; Gibbons, Conroy & Bell, 1995; Gibbons, Gallagher,
Bell & Gordon, 1995; Sharland, Jones, Aldgate, Seal &
Croucher, 1995). These studies point out that professional
intervention within the child protection system should
be undertaken with caution, since under these circum-
stances parents will be unlikely to engage positively with
professional workers. Constructive parental-professional
relationships, characterised by trust and partnership,
were found to significantly influence the likelihood of
successful outcomes for children (Cleaver & Freeman,
1995; Farmer & Owen, 1995; Sharland et al., 1995;
Thoburn, Lewis & Shemmings, 1995). Generally, once
children became subject to the child protection system,
they were adequately protected, though most remained
at home or were swiftly rehabilitated. However, although
largely protected from serious subsequent abuse, con-
centration on children’s well-being did not often extend
to meeting parents’ needs for advice and support
(Farmer & Owen, 1995; Sharland et al., 1995).
Findings from the DoH research programme on the
number of families brought into, and quickly expelled
from, the child protection system, and the tendency to
focus narrowly on child protection rather than family
support, have reinforced pressures to refocus professional
intervention (DoH, 1996a; also Audit Commission, 1994;
Children Act Report, 1993; Colton, Drury & Williams,
1995). Such refocusing or rebalancing requires local
authorities and their social workers to shift attention
from procedurally narrow investigations under the child
protection system to broader perspectives that embrace
the priorities and sense of enquiry associated with
family support. The requirement on local authorities to
produce children’s services plans identifying need and
developing flexible and responsive services (DoH,
1996b) follows this logic.
Despite official enthusiasm for such refocusing or
re-balancing, some commentators have taken a more
sceptical view of the potential for change in the context
of current legal and procedural imperatives. Parton
(1997) points out that social workers have responded to
increasing demands in terms of child abuse referrals
and to an increasingly complex field in terms of the
contested nature of abuse and the necessity to protect
children from harm whilst, at the same time, enhancing
parental responsibility and family autonomy. He iden-
tifies public inquiries as significantly informing the
development of more formal, legalistic approaches to
child protection so that social workers have become
more concerned with making a defensible decision
rather than a right one in child protection. He accuses
central government of producing the very child pro-
tection system in which social workers and families are
now ensnared, without offering them a way out.
Parton suggests that the only supportable way forward
is to remove responsibility for either child protection or
family support from local authority control. Commenting
on the DoH’s obsession with outcome measures, Wattam
(1997) argues that if we wish to understand why the
child protection system works as it does, we must focus
on how social workers actually make judgements and
decisions in their everyday practice. This would mean
an appreciation of process rather than simply describing
consequences. She argues that what children need is not
only a child protection system, as now, but a range of
flexible and responsive services that they can use in
their own right, in confidence, at any time when they
decide that they want help and support. This would
be a radical departure from current arrangements, in
recognising children as reliable arbiters of their own
best interests, extending the child protection system
beyond legalistic manoeuvres.
While the focus on child protection has gradually
increased and the ambit of child abuse widened, ‘children’
still consume less resources within personal social
services than ‘elderly people’. In 1994 altogether nearly
twice as much was spent on residential elderly care as
residential childcare, and the overall budget for the
‘elderly’ was a third greater than that for ‘children’.

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Throughout, two features of the British child welfare
system need emphasising. First, state intervention on
and management of child welfare has generally been
separated from the general state system of family income
maintenance. There have been some exceptions to this,
such as provision of Section 1 money under the 1963
Act (Handler, 1973). Second, in the post-war period
there has been a marked absence of central and local
government support and investment in pre-school day
care. Despite some statements of intent, public pre-
school provision has remained very low indeed.
The 1980s and 1990s were a period of Conservative
government, ideological movement to the right, greater
emphasis on ‘family values’, welfare cutbacks and strin-
gency in social administration rules (such as welfare
payments to the unemployed, young adults and students).
The current context of services to children is complex,
including privatisation of welfare services, internal markets,
fragmentation of state structures and increasing centra-
lisation of state financial and policy control. Since 1997
Labour governments have made shifts towards a less-
rigid policy stance. With the National Childcare Strategy
(Meeting the Childcare Challenge, 1998), this appears
less hostile to state professionals and family forms other
than the nuclear family, with more government support
for pre-school childcare, personal tax credit concessions
and nursery provision for four-year-olds.
Finland
Historical background
Literally and interestingly, the Finnish term lastensuojelu
refers to the protection of children, even though the
connotations of the term are quite different from ‘child
protection’ in the UK. The idea of protecting children
from their parents was the leading principle in Finland’s
first child protection act in 1936. This is in fact later
than some of the state initiatives in England noted
above. Prior to 1936, children’s well-being in Finland
was based mostly on the patriarchal and autonomous
family. The male head of the family was formally solely
in charge of family property and care. Only children
who were orphans or abandoned by their parents had
been taken into public care as part of poor relief. Children
challenging social norms by committing criminal offences,
for example, had been looked after mainly by the justice
system. The early stages of urbanisation and industria-
lisation and the violent national conflicts in the early
decades of the 20th century had, however, increased the
number of orphans, neglected children and also ‘asocially
behaving’ children so that several attempts were made
to pass legislation on children in need or at risk. There
was, however, disagreement of the aims and forms of
public care and it was as late as in 1936 when the act
was finally established. The first adoption act was passed
in 1925, emphasising the importance of permanent
family care for children and the economic nature of this
intervention (Nieminen, 1975: 14–15), which, as also
typically for Finnish child protection later, did not aim
to solve the whole issue of neglected or abused children.
The period influenced by the first child protection act
is often described as state-paternalistic (Forsberg,
1998: 28–36); it became possible for the first time for
the public authority to intervene in the privacy of the
family and in those cases where the children had not
been properly looked after. The right and duty to do so
were obtained by the local authority, that is, the muni-
cipal social/child welfare boards. Decision-making in
child protection issues was carried out by the social/
child welfare boards, with the work with children and
families done by social workers. The boards were, and
still are, a lay organisation, part of the local political
administration. In the Act, local authorities were asked
to provide guidance and some material support to the
families, but the intervention of most importance was
taking the children into care, either residential or
family care.
The first child protection act was criticised heavily
as being too narrow in its approach to the problems of
children and families. Since 1936, social and family
policy has been directed at meeting some of the needs
of families and children, foremost financial needs, in
order to cover those groups as a whole. It was only
in the early 1980s that the first child protection act was
replaced by a new one. This meant a radical change in
the approach as the second Child Protection Act (1983)
introduced a wider welfare frame for child protection.
This was supported by other legislation directed towards
families and children, custody issues among others.
‘Welfare of children’ and ‘the best interest of children’
were given first priority instead of protection. Taking
the child into care was seen as a last resort intervention,
whereas care in the family as well as social, financial
and psychological support were priorities. Open care
was introduced as the primary intervention in actual
child protection cases, emphasising the importance of
care in the natural (family) setting. Open care measures
include a variety of social services; for example, home
help, day care and financial support tailored to support
the child and the family. The local authorities, the social
welfare boards, were still in charge of taking care of
the welfare and well-being of children and families, but
many other social institutions and actors were required
to do the same as well, including school and health care
authorities, town planning authorities, etc. Those parties
involved in improving the welfare of children were
expanding, but simultaneously on the municipal level
in actual child- or family-focused protection cases; the
role of social workers became more central as most
social welfare boards delegated their decision-making
power to the social (case) workers.

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Under the new child protection legislation, the
number of children in child protection has increased, as
the figures also include the ‘open care’ clients. Under
the new legislation, about two-thirds of registered child
protection clients have been in open care. In 2000,
about 50,000 were in ‘open care’ (4.3% of all children
under the age of 18), whereas there were only 7,300
children in care (Bardy, Salmi & Heino, 2001: 90–94).
The number of those children who had been placed
out of their homes made up 1.1% of all the child
population under the age of 18. The emphasis is on
supportive and preventative work with families, which
can include other public services provided to children
and families, relatively numerous in the context of the
Finnish welfare state (Millar & Warman, 1996: 21–32).
Public day care, for example, has been much used for
child protection/welfare purposes. Cooperation with
public authorities and other service providers has been
an essential part of Finnish child protection work, and
is often encouraged as the tool for successful child
protection.
The recent child protection act is a skeleton law. It
does not specify exactly the conditions when social
workers ought to intervene. Hence, the social workers
are given a fair amount of discretionary power to
decide what is a threat to children’s health and develop-
ment to such an extent that interventions are needed.
Decision-making in child protection issues is often
more professionally guided than regulated exactly by
law. What professionalism in decision-making means
is well illustrated by Tarja Heino (1997), who has
shown that it is a dynamic process where cognitive
knowledge and arguments are coloured by both nor-
mative and emotional elements. The decisions made
by social workers should, naturally, be legally and
administratively correct in addition to being profes-
sionally solid. If the parents or children (especially over
the age of 12) disagree with the decisions made by
the social worker(s), they have the right to make a
formal complaint. The arena for them is the admin-
istrative county courts. The number of child protection
decisions made at the level of county courts slowly
increased in the 1990s. In 1998, approximately 11%
of all the decisions about taking the child into care
were based on the disagreement of either the parent(s)
or child (Heino, 2000; Heino, Korpinen and Sallila,
1996).
The vocabulary of child protection issues
Child welfare problems are often viewed as a set of
different types of social, emotional, practical and
interactional difficulties in the families. Child protection
legislation does not require any prompt specification of
problems behind the interventions but more or less that
intervention is needed to promote the child’s best
interest. The vocabulary of abuse and neglect does not
characterise the talk – or statistics, or guidebooks, or
textbooks – around child protection. Instead, very
strongly, the family and family problems tend to be used
as the descriptive resources for notifying and defining
the protection issues.
Various studies (for example, Bardy, Salmi & Heino,
2001; Forssén, 1993) reporting on municipal child
protection reveal that family conflicts, alcoholism and
helplessness in everyday life routines are commonly
described as the major problems. There is an obvious
tendency in social work debate to include a variety of
issues (such as unstable life style, relationship problems,
tiredness, even some abuse) in the category of ‘family
conflicts’; the point is, however, that the parent(s) is/are
unable to look after the child’s and provide them with
proper care. Very often the problems of the child and
his/her behaviour are reported as child protection prob-
lems only in the children’s teenage years, when asocial
behaviour, alcohol or drug abuse and minor crimes are
regarded as main child protection problems in addition
to the family conflicts in the teenagers’ families.
In the mid-1990s, financial problems and parental
unemployment were often mentioned as important
background factors in child protection problems, factors
which the social workers felt helpless to deal with because
of mass unemployment and cuts in social welfare provi-
sion. It has been increasingly difficult to provide any
proper open-care support as the resources do not exist
to the extent that the child protection legislation assumes.
Interestingly, there have also been concerns on the lack
of resources to take children into care (Bardy et al.,
2001; Lastensuojelusta kohti lapsipolitiikkaa, 1995). It
is claimed that the children should have the right to be
placed out of their homes and that right has been
threatened by diminishing municipal resources, leading
to regional inequality. Thus, the vocabulary about the
availability of services characterises the description of
child protection problems as well. The nature of the
categorisations noted reflects the understanding of
child welfare issues: the categories describe everyday life
issues with mundane terminology. Specific diagnoses
have often been avoided; there is, however, a growing
interest in introducing more detailed client/problem
descriptions of child protection practice and decision-
making (Kananoja & Turunen, 1996; Taskinen, 1999).
Before the 1990s, academic research on child welfare
was almost non-existent in Finland. Research in the area
was characteristically administrative by nature, carried
out by administrative authorities. However, students
of social policy and social work did carry out a con-
siderable amount of research in their masters’ theses
(for example, Bardy, 1989). This general situation is very
different from other Nordic countries, especially Sweden,
where child welfare has had a strong status in social
work studies (Hessle, 1997). The lack of child welfare

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studies can be linked to the general approach to academic
social work, with social policy and macro-orientations
often guiding social work research. This changed, how-
ever, in the 1990s. Child welfare has become a major
research area in social work, with much challenging
methodological experimentation, especially in studies
on child welfare (for example, Forsberg, 1994, 1998;
Heino, 1997; Kuronen, 1994; Nyqvist, 1995) at the same
time as a clear increase in research on social work has
taken place. Social work has gained more independence
from social policy and micro-issues have become more
central in social work studies and debates (Karvinen,
Pösö & Satka, 1999).
Child welfare research took a rather constructionist
line in the 1990s. Key research questions have included:
What is a social problem? What is a family? How is
child welfare clienthood constructed? (Forsberg, 1994,
1998; Heino, 1997; Oranen, 1997; Pösö, 1993, 1997).
Studies in the 1990s have examined social work prac-
tices in everyday social work in different organisa-
tional contexts from the social workers’ point of view.
Methodologically, ethnography and discourse analyses
have been popular. Alongside this, the administratively
oriented interest in evaluating and assessing quality in
child welfare has led to many research reports. There
has also been a new interest in studying the role of child
welfare clients (cf. Forsberg, 2002; Forssén, 1997) and
childhood and the social and cultural position of children
(Bardy, 1996; Kiili, 1998; Riihelä, 1996). What is lacking
in the Finnish child welfare research agenda is political
or ideological analysis.
Child protection as part of the social services system
The organisational structure of public lastensuojelu has
deep roots in Finnish society as the local municipalities
have been the central actors since the end of the 19th
century. There is and has been a handful of visionary
and powerful third-sector organisations in child welfare
and protection which have played an important role in
shaping general policies on children as well as in
providing services for children and families in need.
These organisations have focused their activities on
children and families, whereas municipalities are
responsible for other welfare issues as well; it is the
municipal social welfare office that provides services in
child protection, income maintenance, care of substance
abuse etc. Due to the present approach to municipal
social work, all such tasks are most often carried out
by each social worker in the office.
The centrality of municipal social welfare has been
challenged for many reasons. First, it has not been able
to provide all the open care measures on its own, but
has needed the cooperation of the third-sector society
and organisations to provide them. Therefore, close co-
operation is needed. Second, the frame of professional
social work to deal with all child protection issues has
been seen as not sufficient enough and thus inter-
professional cooperation has been encouraged, espe-
cially in youth work and psychiatry. Also, to cover the
legal side of child protection, legal actors and institu-
tions have become more important than they used to
be. Some of these tendencies have increased the role of
public authorities as their network has become wider.
At the same time, child protection is experiencing more
public and governmental interest, mainly concerning
the quality of interventions (Rousu & Holma, 1999;
Taskinen, 1999), with more development programmes
in child protection than ever before. Meanwhile, it very
easily becomes a media issue to express concerns about
the position of biological parents in cases where their
parenting skills are examined by social workers; in the
media, child protection is seen to threaten the rights of
biological parents.
Concluding discussion
Let us first summarise some major differences in the
context of child welfare and lastensuojelu/child protection.
In England some key features of the context are:
•the absence of state support for pre-school day care;
•remedial rather than preventative, tending to separate
child protection from child welfare more generally;
•law-led (‘legalism’) rather than discretion-based;
•family- and individual child-oriented rather than
community-oriented;
•separated from the system of social security and
income maintenance.
In contrast, the context of lastensuojelu in Finland can
be characterised as:
•the presence of public provision of pre-school day
care;
•preventative rather than remedial, tending to integrate
child welfare;
•discretion-based rather than law-led (‘legalism’);
•family- and community-oriented rather than individual
child-oriented;
•not organisationally separated from the municipal
provision of social services and income maintenance.
To some extent the systems and practices of the two
countries appear to be in a process of change and even
moderate convergence, with some apparent limited
movements towards ‘family support’ in the UK and
towards ‘legalism’ in Finland.
This article has addressed several interconnected
themes and tasks. Most obviously, it is about telling
different ‘national’ stories on policy development, relating
to lastensuojelu/child protection. Comparing the contents
and structures of such stories could be an important
research topic in itself, as in how the nation figures and

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39
is represented in considering child welfare and children,
in national legal reforms, war and peace and welfare
state development. These stories provide contexts for
understanding everyday practices of social workers,
dealing with families where problems and challenges
are recognised. Within these broad relatively long-term
historical contexts, our own detailed empirical research
looks at lastensuojelu/child protection as mundane,
concrete practices.
Our research examines to what extent general prin-
ciples of contrast between the two welfare systems are
reproduced in concrete social work practice. This involves
refining broad contrasts and showing how they may be
subject to variation, even contradiction, in ways difficult
to predict. There is a major paradox to be articulated:
the greater the interest in subjective meaning in the
everyday world, the greater is the need to broaden the
analysis in historical and policy contexts to understand
those meanings. The micro and the macro are intimately
connected within critical realism. The distinctiveness of
the two systems can be lost if concepts are applied from
one system to the other too easily.
A very important part of our research has been dealing
with concepts and questions arising from ongoing
attempts to define concepts. We have spent many hours
on questions of language, discussing, for example, what
we mean by a ‘client’. Several of the main results of our
research stem from these lengthy discussions on defining
concepts the way they are used in mundane practices.
It is important that the questions that have arisen from
defining concepts are real results of our research, and
not only ways to get to understand systems better. Our
research seeks to problematise what is taken for granted
in the theory and practice of social work within particular
cultural and national contexts, including the very question
of ‘What is child protection?’ For example, while in the
UK context the idea of a social work ‘case’ is paramount
in child protection, for the historical and cultural
reasons set out that idea does not figure in the Finnish
lastensuojelu. Lastly, we comment on the implications
of this work and guidelines for conducting similar
cross-national research. There are major difficulties in
such comparative research – practical, cultural, linguistic,
administrative, statistical, theoretical and so on.
From the work we have done together, four issues
have emerged in the task of developing future research
of this kind. First, the importance of understanding
difference in history and, for want of a better word,
‘culture’ must be emphasised. These are not vague, remote
contexts; they influence the creation and everyday
operations of welfare systems. The intersections of the
‘macro’ historical and the ‘micro’ mundane are intimate
and intense. Second, and linked to this, our historical
and cultural observations have made us cautious in
transferring concepts from one country to the other in
too simple a way, in studying lastensuojelu/child
protection. This applies to the overall conceptualisation
of the field, its naming, as well as notions of ‘client’,
‘case’, ‘professional autonomy’ etc. Third, we urge more
attention to and self-reflective study of the practical
organisation of comparative research projects. They are
not easy, but they are a growing form of research and
raise many theoretical, practical and linguistic issues
rarely addressed in research method textbooks. On a
final positive note, comparative research has policy and
practice implications in highlighting the strengths and
weaknesses of different systems; for example, the
bringing together of preventive family support, focused
concern with intervention against child sexual abuse,
and more general commitment to anti-oppressive and
anti-discriminatory practice.
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