Child participation in child welfare removals through the looking glass: Estonian children’s and professionals’ perspectives compared

Participation is one of the basic rights of the child, which includes participation in juridical decision-making processes that affect the life of the child; however, considering the complexity of judicial proceedings such as child welfare removal and the peculiarities connected to a child as a vulnerable human being in his/her developmental process, this is not an easy topic. The outcome of child participation, whether harmful or beneficial, depends on many different factors, including the quality of professionals’ activity during the process. In this paper, we discuss professionals’ ability to support children’s positive participation in decision making in Estonian child welfare removal. In our analysis, we compare children’s perspectives with professionals’ perspectives. The children’s perspectives are based on their lived experiences of removal, and the professionals’ perspectives originate from the views of child protection workers (CPW) and advocates who represent children during removal proceedings. The data derive from the authors’ recent research projects. First, we secondarily analyzed a selection of transcripts of interviews (n = 20) with children with lived experience of removal from Estonian research for a Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) project (2013–14). Second, we analyzed the Estonian part of the inquiry data from the Improving Decisions through Empowerment and Advocacy (IDEA) project (2017–19) questionnaires administered to specialists (n = 107), with a particular focus on the respondents’ comments and answers to the qualitative open-ended questions. The conceptual framework for the comparison is based on Lundy’s model of child participation. The results show significant differences between children’s and professionals’ interpretations of child participation and a deficit of dialogues between children and professionals in child welfare removal proceedings.