Child Welfare Services and their Work With Cases of Violence and Abuse

This project aims to fill the knowledge gap about how the Norwegian child welfare service tackles violence and abuse cases.

Violence and abuse constitute a significant and increasing part of child welfare cases. Despite this, there is limited knowledge about how the child welfare service tackles this type of cases. The project will help to fill this knowledge gap. It is funded by the Directorate for Children, Youth and Families (Bufdir) and is carried out in a collaboration between researchers at NOVA/OsloMet, NTNU and NKVTS.

The study is limited to violence in close relationships and its main purpose is to provide knowledge about how the child welfare service handles cases of violence and abuse, and how children and parents (or other support persons) experience the child welfare service's work. 
We will explore what kind of understandings of violence that inform the child welfare services` practice, their practice regarding decisions and measures and how children and parents experience the support.  Additionally, we will explore the internal and external framework conditions for the child welfare practice, and how the child welfare service cooperates with other services.

The research design is sequential and includes four types of data:

• Literature review
• User study (interviews with children and parents)  
• Case study (10 child welfare services) 
• National survey.  

In addition, we have interviewed the leaders of 20 child welfare service offices about their experiences from the first phase of the corona pandemic. The results of this sub study will be published in a NOVA-notat at the end of 2020.  

Results from the main study will be published in a NOVA-report in 2022. The results will be important for development of policy and practice regarding the child welfare services work with violence and abuse and give valuable insight into crisis management.