The objective was to explore how children and young people retrospectively described their own strategies to get access to protection and support for recovery after disclosing child sexual abuse. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 14 young people who had disclosed sexual abuse during childhood shows that the participants adopted a range of strategies to be able to access protection and support for recovery. The strategies include finding allies among adults, arguing their case, resisting adult agendas, taking initiatives, and choosing exit. The results demonstrate how a child’s agency may contribute to the outcomes for a particular child, while children’s opportunities for protection and recovery are both restricted by parental rights and heavily depend on responsive adults pushing a children’s rights agenda.

This book aims to expand and enrich understandings of violences by focusing on gendered continuities, interconnections and intersections across multiple forms and manifestations of mens violence. In actively countering, both, the compartmentalisation of studies of violence by type and form, and the tendency to conceptualise violence narrowly, it aims to flesh out not delimit understandings of violence.

Bringing together cross-disciplinary, indeed transdisciplinary, perspectives, this book addresses how what are often seen as specific and separate violences connect closely and intricately with wider understandings of violence, how there are gendered continuities between violences and how gendered violences take many forms and manifestations and are themselves intersectional. Grounded by the recognition that violence is, itself, a form of inequality, the contributors to this volume traverse the intersectional complexities across, both, experiences of violent inequality, and what is seen to count as violence.

The international scope of this book will be of interest to students and academics across many fields, including sociology, criminology, psychology, social work, politics, gender studies, child and youth studies, military and peace studies, environmental studies and colonial studies, as well as practitioners, activists and policymakers engaged in violence prevention.

Previous research indicates that child welfare services reach out to children exposed to violence unequally depending on the child’s social background, living conditions and violence type, and that once children are investigated by the child welfare services, inequalities in access to interventions prevail (e.g. Kalin et al. 2022; Knezevic 2021; Persdotter & Andersson 2020; Quarles van Ufford et al. 2022). There is a lack of systematic knowledge about the long term outcomes for children investigated by the child welfare services. The current study explores different childhood trajectories in the aftermath of a child welfare investigation initiated due to children’s exposure to violence. A register was set up including all children (n= 1 764) between 7-12 years that were investigated by child welfare services in Stockholm in 2019 for suspected exposure to violence. As a baseline this cohort was systematically compared to demographic data and a national self-report prevalence study to explore possible biases regarding which children the child welfare services investigates (Kassman et al. 2023). In the current paper, the study group development in the first three years following upon the child welfare investigation was explored as regards living conditions, out of home care, health care consumption and school grades. The development of the study group was also systematically compared to a comparison group of children (n=5 000). Descriptive analysis, cluster analysis and logistic regressions were used. 

Objective: Based on the notion of selective recognition of vulnerability and risk, this study explores which children CWS pursue to a complete child welfare investigation.

Methods: A register was set up including all children (n= 1 764) between 7-12 years that were investigated for suspected exposure to violence by CWS in Sweden in 2019. This cohort was systematically compared to demographic data and a national self-report prevalence study. 

Results: Children exposed to violence have reduced access to material resources and inferior living conditions compared to non-exposed children. Physical abuse was more prevalent among boys of foreign backgrounds in stable, two-parent families residing in higher-status suburbs. Conversely, neglect was more common among children of Swedish backgrounds in low-income, single-parent households living in low-status suburbs. In comparison with self-reported prevalence studies, sexual and psychological abuse seem underrepresented in the study group.

Conclusions: The results indicate that CWS should develop its methods to reach certain vulnerable groups that are underrepresented for safeguarding and support, for example, girls exposed to sexual abuse.

From a sociological perspective, this chapter discusses how agency interventions in the lives of children involved in family disputes, could become as child-centred and child-friendly as possible. It is divided into two parts, the first focusing on child health in family disputes, and the second on children’s participation and perspectives. The discussion sets out the results of several empirical studies of children in contact with family-law services and identifies implications for policy and practice. On a policy level, the author describes a need to dissolve boundaries between family-law proceedings and child welfare. To reach that objective in practice, the issue of children’s participation is connected to risk assessments and how best to communicate with children. The author explains how both the principle of care and the principle of participation can be simplified, then applied in practice, in order to contribute to the child’s sense of security and coherence. It is further argued that children’s participation can be enhanced, drawing on research of how best to communicate with them. Finally, the chapter explores children’s actions beyond participation, noting that, the children interviewed in one of the studies, emphasized their right to decide for themselves.

The article presents a study on structured support for the professional assessment of emergent domestic violence in families with children. Data are presented on the development and study of a new structured support called iRiSk emergency, which was developed jointly by the authors of this article, and an emergency social work unit in Stockholm, Sweden. The model was developed from the iRiSk model, which, translated from Swedish, stands for ‘Interventions and Risk and Protection Assessments for children exposed to violence’. Structured support for emergency risk assessments is rare as existing instruments mainly focus on screening for violence and are not designed to guide professionals in situations of identified violence. The purpose of the research project is elaborated through two research questions: (1) Which information is needed for emergency assessments, and how can it be collected? (2) What are the specific preconditions of the child welfare service emergency work to be taken into account in terms of emergency risk assessments? The feedback from the social workers was that iRiSk emergency was flexible to use, decreased the risk of missing important risk factors and made the assessments more child-centred. The model appears to be a viable approach for enhancing the systematic evaluation and testing of structured support for emergency risk assessment in social work, surpassing the limitations of the current study.

A growing interest in children's participation has led to an increased need for methods for communicating with children. Empirical knowledge on ways to secure children's participation in encounters with welfare professionals and in decisions regarding their life is, however, scarce. One example of a practice model intended to enable children's participation is ‘Good Dialogues’. Presenting results from an evaluation study of the feasibility and practical use of the Good Dialogues model, this article explores the ways in which practitioners manage to put the agenda of child-centred and child-guided dialogues with children underpinning this model into practice. The ways in which children's participation is undermined are also discussed as well as the need for further knowledge development.