Our members, Prof. Jill Duerr Berrick (U.C. Berkeley, US) and Prof. Marit Skivenes (University of Bergen, Norway), talk about their new volume, co-edited with Prof. Neil Gilbert (U.C. Berkeley, US), The Oxford Handbook of Child Protection Systems (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Most, if not all nations, have devised systems to protect children from harm or extreme danger. But how nations across the globe conceptualize harm, their responsibilities, and even how they define childhood, varies. These differences, along with a nation’s history, culture, resources, and other factors, shape child protection systems.
Too little is known about how these systems compare, and what or who they are designed to protect. The Oxford Handbook of Child Protection Systems was developed to describe the diverse practices and policies that make up child protection across the globe, including a representation of countries from the global south – geographies that are frequently excluded from the child welfare literature.
The book includes chapters written by country experts about the design, intentions, and approach to child welfare in 50 countries, from 6 continents. Each chapter provides a description of the broad outlines of the system for child protection including who the system targets, which problems the system tackles, how the system responds, who provides the system-response, and how the system is financed.
Using each chapter as a form of qualitative text data, we – the editors – looked for patterns across and between countries. In the final chapter of the book, we offer a fresh perspective on our understanding of global child protection by offering a new typology that categorizes child protection systems into 5 main patterns, based on an understanding of cumulative hierarchies of childhood risk and that employ different focal strategies for protecting children.
Efforts to develop typologies of child protection systems are not new. A precursor to this body of work was Esping-Andersen’s groundbreaking efforts to characterize western industrial nations’ social safety net -- the welfare state -- into identifiable groups.
Gilbert – one of our authors – was one of the first researchers in 1997 to examine child protection systems across nine western industrialized countries. Based on case studies, he developed a binary formulation, suggesting that countries were largely grouped into two orientations which he characterized as “child protection” and “family-service” systems.
The vast majority of international comparative studies of child protection, with few exceptions, have focused on Western Europe and other western industrialized nations. Few efforts have examined child protection in low-to-moderate income countries that include diverse cultures, social, political, and religious contexts. This limitation unnecessarily narrows our understanding of global system designs. Moreover, the global typology can serve as a framework against which policymakers, researchers, students, and professionals can assess and aspire to strengthen their own country system.
Societies are at an intersection when it comes to how children are treated and how their rights are respected. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child has created tensions in the traditional relationship between the family and the state, with children a focus of government responsibility under certain state-defined norms relating to harm and need, and parents sometimes constrained by the state from exercising their (familial or property) rights.
While impressive gains have been made in some areas pertaining to children’s rights in the 30 years since the CRC was ratified by the United Nations Assembly, in other areas germane to the topic of this book, progress in securing children’s rights to an adequate standard of care, safety and protection has been less pronounced. Child maltreatment, in all its forms, is a serious issue on a global scale.
This Handbook describes and analyzes the ways in which 50 countries from every continent, except Antarctica, have devised measures for child protection emphasized in the UNCRC. But government bodies across the world vary dramatically in their understandings of maltreatment. What does “protection against physical violence” mean when corporal punishment is outlawed in one country, but in another, the large majority of children experience harsh physical discipline at the hands of parents? What does “protection from sexual abuse” mean when one country prohibits sexual contact between adults and children under age 18, and another country allows child marriage for girls under the age of 10? The common characteristic is the state’s interest in protection from maltreatment, but the central problem of concern is not defined the same way by all countries.
Similarly, to describe a child protection system, we must start with a definition of the child. But even this is contested and open to interpretation in the literature and among states. Children are defined by UNICEF as persons below the age of 18 years. Most countries align with the UNICEF definition, but a handful of states primarily aim to protect children below age 13 or 14, and others include young adults up to 21 and 25 years.
Some children are living in exceptionally difficult conditions, facing life threatening violence, abuse and deprivation. The magnitude of problems and the number of children affected by such difficulties are, however, very different across societies. The developmental stage of the child protection system within a state appears to be correlated with the developmental stage of the overall welfare state and the governmental institutions in a country. Protecting children´s rights, of course, is more difficult in low-income countries where living standards pose general risks for families and the welfare state does not have sufficient resources to respond to family needs and assist parents and the family to provide for their children.
Child protection arrangements in many countries are therefore in different stages of development. They vary on a number of dimensions such as: the definition of risks, how state responses are regulated and organised, decision-making processes for determining eligibility, the level of professionalization, the degree of service integration, and the availability of administrative data to keep track of operations.
Based on case studies of state child protection systems, the Handbook identifies some of the critical dimensions around which different types of child protection systems cluster. The concluding chapter presents an analysis of these dimensions and how they contribute to the conceptualization of a new, global typology of child protection systems. Drawing on data from 50 countries, the typology is based on a conceptualization of cumulative hierarchies of childhood risk and typify the focal strategies for protecting children, which correspond to five types of child protection systems - each system imbedding the previous risk orientation. The five system types are described as: (a) child exploitation-protective systems, (b) child deprivation-protective systems, (c) child maltreatment-protective systems, (d) child well-being-protective systems, and (e) child rights-protective systems. The typology offers a comparative lens that advances our understanding of alternative child protection practices and policies throughout the world.
Why study international child protection? International comparisons about the nature and scope of child protection offer opportunities to understand global similarities and differences; they also shed light on the underlying values, mechanisms, and institutions across states. As such, they serve an aspirational purpose as residents and legislators of individual nations develop and strengthen their approach to supporting children and families. The questions at the heart of child protection are thorny; finding the appropriate balance between the child, the parents, and the state has no absolute answer. The relative differences in state approaches across the globe, however, offer important insights to learn from others.
Copyright © 2023 by Oxford University Press and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.