2012).
In child protection, the power of street-level bureaucrats was evidenced by a research study conducted by Smith and Donovan (2003), who examined how frontline child protection workers in Illinois (US) dealt with the organizational pressures and institutional limitations in their work when reuniting children with families they had been removed from. Almost all the street-level bureaucrats the authors interviewed and observed in court used several strategies to deal with institutional constraints: they focused their energy on the parents they considered most demanding, thus prioritizing and cherry picking one group of parents while ignoring others. They denied the possibility that they could change parental behaviour (and therefore did not attempt to do so), or they attributed the failure of family reunification to the behaviour of individual parents by labelling them as ‘resistant’ (Smith and Donovan, 2003). While these types of behaviours may be functional for the individual street-level bureaucrat and the organization, they create systematic consequences by shaping ‘policy as produced’ (Brodkin, 2012, p 942). This is policy that differs from the original intention of policy makers. Such consequences are problematic because their impact can undermine both the original intent of the policy (Lipsky, 1980) and the legitimacy of the state.
Child protection in Norway and the US
A sizeable number of children in Norway and the US encounter public child protection agencies when child protection workers investigate children’s caregivers for child maltreatment, remove children from home or develop service plans to assist families. Their interventions may include parenting support in the family, daycare, individual or family therapy, drug use disorder treatment, financial and housing assistance, and (if children have been removed from their family) foster, kin and residential care and adoption. In both countries, when a referral about child abuse and neglect reaches the public child protection agency, child protection workers investigate to assess the risk to the child and determine whether the child can safely remain in their home. In the US, after child maltreatment has been reported to a child protection agency, the report is either assessed for a child’s risk of harm or, in some states, leads to an alternative or differential response. A differential response focuses on fulfilling a family’s service needs with the help of the family and community services in cases where risk to the child is considered low or moderate. This could involve services such as welfare assistance and access to counselling. This is the type of response system of many counties in California (Reed and Karpilow, 2002; Berrick Duerr, 2018), the US state where the interviews for this book were conducted. Child protection workers in both countries make recommendations to the court (California) or the county board (Norway) to initiate a care order. This is a court order to move a child to an out-of-home placement (Berrick Duerr, Peckover, Pösö & Skivenes, 2015). It must be emphasized that the issues that child protection caseworkers in Norway and the United States face are similar – in both countries, workers deal with child neglect and abuse, and aim to keep children and young people safe.7
In Norway, child protection investigations were started or under way for 46,903 children under the age of 18 years by the end of 2016 – 42.2 children out of 1,000 children in that age group.8 Also by the end of 2016, 12,636 children under 18 (11.4 children out of 1,000 children of that age) were in out-of-home care (Statistics Norway, 2017a). In the US in 2016, 3.5 million children (or 46.7 children per 1,000 children under the age of 18 years) were estimated to have received a child protection investigation or an alternative response. The number of children under 18 who were victims of child abuse and neglect was estimated to amount to 671,622 children nationally, or 9.1 per 1,000 children (US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau, 2018a). In the US, 437,465 children between birth and 20 years were in foster care nationally by the end of September 2016 (US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, 2017).9 This means that five out of 1,000 children in this age group were in foster care in the US.
Table 1.2 illustrates the main differences between the welfare state and child protection systems of the two countries.
Table 1.2:Legal, policy and organizational frameworks
| Norway | California | |
| Welfare state context | ●Social democratic1 | ●Liberal/residual1 |
| Child protection system orientation | ●Family service-oriented and child-centric2 ●Low intervention threshold4 | ●Child protection-oriented3 ●High intervention threshold4 |
| Legal or policy guidance about children’s participation | ●Yes: legislation5 ●Yes: practice guidance7 | ●Yes: caseworker practice guidance5 ●Yes: court hearings6 |
| Child protection workers’ professional discretion | ●Wide8 | ●Narrow: investigations ●Structured Decision-Making (SDM)9 ●Case reviews: Team-Decision-Making10 |
Sources:
1 Esping-Andersen, 1990; Arts & Gelissen, 2002
2 Berrick Duerr, 2011; Križ & Skivenes, 2014
3 Skivenes, 2011; Križ & Skivenes, 2014
4 Skivenes & Søvig, 2017
5 Berrick Duerr, Dickens, Pösö & Skivenes, 2015
6 Barnes et al, 2012; California Courts, 2019
7 BLD, 2009, cited in Eidhammer, 2014
8 Berrick Duerr, Dickens, Pösö & Skivenes, 2015; Križ & Skivenes, 2015
9 Berrick Duerr, Peckover, Pösö & Skivenes, 2015; Berrick Duerr, 2018
10 Berrick Duerr, Peckover, Pösö & Skivenes, 2015
Norway and the US embrace different types of welfare state models (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Arts & Gelissen, 2002) and child welfare systems (Gilbert et al, 2011). In the US, a liberal or residual welfare regime, the state only provides residual services to the most destitute through means-tested social programmes. Norway is a social-democratic welfare state that provides universal public services to children and families (Esping-Andersen, 1990), such as subsidized daycare for children starting at the age of one year (Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs, 2017). The difference in the two countries’ social safety nets (wider in Norway than the US) and the extent of their public welfare provisions (more generous in Norway than the US) has implications for the variation in poverty levels and affects how the two countries score on the children’s well-being index for OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries (UNICEF, 2013). This index includes variables such as material well-being, health, safety and education (UNICF, 2013). The US is ranked comparatively low on this index, whereas Norway is ranked among the top five out of 29 countries. Norway is ranked number two in children’s ‘overall well-being’ (UNICEF, 2013, p 2), behind the Netherlands and ahead of Iceland, Finland and Sweden. The US
