can become empowered citizens by being granted full inclusion into their community through genuine participation in decision-making. This status of full-fledged citizenship is called ‘substantive citizenship’ (Glenn, 2010). Child protection caseworkers, as the ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 1980) implementing child protection policy in their interactions with children and families, can create children’s substantive citizenship status in their interactions with them. Citizenship, Glenn (2010) posited, is more than individuals’ access to formal rights. It is a social status obtained through processes of inclusion or exclusion, ‘constructed through face-to-face interactions and through place-specific practices that occur within larger structural contexts’ (2010, p 2). While these interactions, and the social structures they are embedded in, shape children’s citizenship, children themselves shape their citizenship through their agency, as Bacon and Frankel (2014) contend.
In child protection, children’s substantive citizenship status is constructed in the face-to-face interactions between children, their caregivers and adults working in the child protection system, including child protection workers, judges, legal representatives and other adults. Children’s full inclusion in their community, their status as fully-fledged citizens, requires their empowered participation in these interactions. This includes their ability to express their opinion and have it taken seriously in interactions with child protection workers and others who seek to safeguard their wellbeing. When child protection workers empower children by giving them the opportunity to genuinely participate in decisions, they help children obtain substantive citizenship.
I am a comparative sociologist and have lived half of my life in Europe and half of my life in the US. The question of how the construction of children’s substantive citizenship in child protection differs across child protection systems intrigued me. I departed from the theoretical standpoint that three types of context can influence child protection workers’ interactions with the children on their caseload, namely: formal rights related to children’s participation, such as the CRC and child protection laws and policies at the country level; practices and procedures at the organizational level (the child protection agency); and cultural ideologies about children, childhood, and children’s participation, especially of children from families in poverty and children of colour. A similar approach to citizenship has been employed by scholars in the field of gender studies (see, for example, Haney, 1996, 2002; Korteweg, 2006). Gender scholars have combined analyses of the legal, policy and interactional levels when studying citizenship. For example, Korteweg (2006) compared how citizenship is gendered in welfare-to-work workshops in the Netherlands and the US. Her findings ‘show the usefulness of understanding citizenship as not solely the granting or withholding of social rights through formal social policy legislation. It becomes clear that citizenship, much like social policy, is partly constructed at the street level, where particular bureaucratic practices are conduits for the signs through which citizen-subjects are recruited’ (Korteweg, 2006, p 335).
It is important to view children’s citizenship in the context of historical and current racial/ethnic and class biases. Historically, citizens have been considered those individuals who are part of a community that grants them the right to make decisions about their lives. This right assumed that human beings can make reasonable choices. This development, which has been occurring for over 250 years, began in the mid-18th century and wrested autonomy and sovereignty away from the power of the monarchy and clergy towards individuals. In the US, social groups other than white, property-owning men managed to gain human rights gradually by fighting for their rights (Hunt, 2007). Historian Lynn Hunt’s (2007) argument about the development of human rights supports the importance of larger cultural forces in the creation of citizenship. She argues that people’s identification with and empathy for others in very different circumstances were instrumental in the creation of human rights. Opposed to the rise of human rights were doctrines of exclusion, such as racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny. These narratives and arguments about innate differences between individuals promoted the exclusion of certain social groups, who were not considered worthy of fully-fledged citizenship (Hunt, 2007).
The notion of children’s fully-fledged citizenship is historically relatively new. It is underpinned by the idea, embodied by the 1989 United Nations CRC, that children are not citizens of tomorrow, but citizens of today who possess rights in their present lives (Doek, 2008). The CRC is commonly cited as the legal platform that cemented the ideal of children’s participation internationally (Invernizzi and Williams, 2008). Article 12 of the CRC established children’s participation in ‘judicial and administrative proceedings’ (such as the processes in child protection) as an important policy goal. It declares:
1.States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.
2.For this purpose, the child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law. (United Nations, 2020, n.p.)
I relied on the concept of ‘street-level bureaucracy’ to examine child protection workers’ practices with and views on empowering children. The insights into the workings of street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky, 1980; Brodkin, 2012) underscore how street-level bureaucrats may affect the construction of children’s participation. Street-level bureaucrats engage in (often unauthorized) informal, yet systematic behaviours (Brodkin, 2012), which build on their own normative judgements and ultimately create the relationship between children and the state. In child protection, child protection workers can either deem children worthy or unworthy of participation. Workers’ perceptions of and attitudes towards children may matter to the extent to which children get the opportunity to participate, how children view themselves, and how others in society see children. In this regard, I was influenced by the insights of Thomas (2007); building on Bourdieu’s (1992) theories of society, he argued that a theory of children’s participation ‘will need to understand not only institutional and legal context and processes, but the cultures and dispositions that underpin them’ (p 216). The dispositions underlying child protection workers’ interactions with children are what I am trying to reveal in this book.
The study of modern bureaucratic organizations, such as public child protection agencies, has a longstanding legacy in the social sciences: Michael Lipsky (1980), who built on Max Weber’s legacy (Weber, 1946), defined street-level bureaucrats as the frontline service workers in public agencies who create public policy in their interactions with clients. In the face of the dilemmas that they invariably encounter in their work – such as budget constraints, unclear or contradictory policy or agency goals, time and information limits, and high caseloads– street-level bureaucrats may ‘distort’ public policy by dealing with clients in ways that undermine the original intention of the policy. They can do so because they enjoy a certain level of professional discretion. The actions of street-level bureaucrats then become the de facto policy (Lipsky, 1980; Brodkin, 2012). Brodkin explained that ‘discretion is of interest not when it is random, but when it is structured by factors that influence informal behaviors to develop in systematic ways. It is these systematic informal behaviors that impart specific practical meaning to policy as produced’ (Brodkin, 2012, p 942). One of the main goals of this book is to examine child protection workers’ systematic, informal practices to find out how they contribute to creating children’s citizenship.
One of the ways in which street-level bureaucrats ‘manage’ clients is by creating psychological benefits and sanctions. The signals that street-level bureaucrats send to clients about their dignity or worthiness (to participate, for example) can then positively, or negatively, reinforce clients’ self-image. The labels that bureaucrats bestow on clients may have implications beyond the bureaucracy if a person’s family or community treats the person differently after being stigmatized by street-level bureaucracy. The labels depend on (structural) factors, such as the bureaucrat’s training, the social context in which the labelling occurs,
