Anbringelse af etniske minoritetsbørn : Om socialarbejderes vurderinger og handlinger

The dissertation studies how social workers ensure continuity in relation to the individual child's background when placing and working with children of ethnic minority background in care. This is studied through 44 sets of case study notes from a foster-care association and interviews with 10 foster-care consultants. These two types of data are analysed through three perspectives: a continuity perspective, a right-to-continuity perspective derived from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and an equality perspective. The study suggests that in general the social workers do not seem to have a continuity perspective that involves the child’s minority background; and the social workers’ assessments and actions are not affected by the child’s continuity rights according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The children with other mother tongues than Danish are in reality denied the right to speak their mother tongue and develop their language through regular contact with others speaking this language. In an equality perspective the foster care study suggests that children taken into care from ethnic minority parents are not given the opportunity to develop social and communicative skills that would put them on an even footing with their peers when it comes to contact with their families. Discussing these findings the dissertation presents a vignette study, where the main result is, that there is no systematic difference in the social workers' assessments and tendencies of actions dependent on whether the boys in the vignettes were called Ali and Osman or Erik and Jan. The discussion also draws on the results of an analysis of what data from Statistics Denmark has to say about children in care and preventative measures in relation to children and young people in 2000 for children and young people categorised in the population statistics as immigrants, descendants and ‘others’. The analysis shows that in all age groups descendants are far less frequently the subjects of care orders than children in the ‘others’ category. Also there is a strong tendency that immigrants are less frequently the subjects of care orders than ‘other’ children in the 5-14 age group. The results of the three sets of data material are discussed with reference to differences in the living conditions of the children in Denmark, differences between the social workers attitudes and their actions in social work, the uncertainty of the social workers when working with ethnic minority children and the quality of the interventions the social workers have to offer the child and its family. The dissertation further suggests that the specific results of the foster care study can be understood in a context of Danish nationality, the specific Danish welfare state regulation and the ideology of social work.