This article is part of a special edition of the journal Psychosocial Intervention (Volume 22 No.03 December 2013) focused on the state of child protection in a wide variety of countries with special attention to out-of-home care placements, principally family foster care and residential care, tough several aspects related to adoption were included as well. The articles in this special edition review the systems and practice in 16 countries chosen to represent very different cultural contexts, historical backgrounds, and social welfare systems. The main aim is to make an international comparison of important historical background, legal framework, current figures, research trends, and key challenges for the future in a sample of countries representing the most important models of welfare regimes (liberal welfare systems, liberal-conservative, social democratic, so called ‘Mediterranean model and countries in transition from communist state system).
This article closes the special issue of this journal by highlighting a series of themes arising from the analysis of the 16 countries, as well as some that are specifics to particular contexts, to encourage reflection on the way in which societies try to guarantee the welfare of children and their families. In that context the authors underline the critical influence on the child protection systems of the historical and cultural conditions in which they developed. According to them, despite the obvious globalising tendencies from which this field cannot escape, the cultural factors in each country continue to have a crucial influence on the ways in which child protection is organized.
Matters such as the use of residential care and its role in the current child care system, the overrepresentation of ethnic minorities in foster care in several countries, the growth of kinship foster care versus non relative foster care, the situation of unaccompanied young people asylum seeking, the use of adoption as a permanent solution, the challenges of the transition to the adulthood from care, the relevance of the professionalization and models based on social pedagogy, the evaluation and planning based on data, and the current financial crisis and its impact on child care systems are some of the topics that are reviewed.
Particularly worth noting is the finding from this review that there is an enormous variety of systems for collecting information on child care systems. The authors note that one of the factors which has been shown to be crucial is the process of administrative decentralisation for managing childcare services. In particular, they note that those countries with a federal structure have the challenge of being able to collect data from each state or canton in order to carry out a national evaluation (as some of them make national plans or implement laws at this level). They call on more efforts to be made to have rigorous data collection systems which allow early detection and needs assessment. They highlight the implications of the failure of those systems in the case of Hungary and Romania, where the presence of Roma children in out-of-home care was hidden in the data because data on ethnicity was understood to violate confidentiality, hampering proper evaluation of this population's overrepresentation in child care or the analysis of socioeconomic causes so this group's access to equal opportunities has suffered.
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©Psychosocial Intervention 22 (2013) 251-7 - Vol. 22 No.03