Research on practice in the child protection agencies in Norway

The Norwegian child protection agencies get in contact with tens of thousands of children each year. When someone contacts the agencies with a concern for a child’s well-being the employees have a week to decide if they will... [ view full abstract ]

The Norwegian child protection agencies get in contact with tens of thousands of children each year. When someone contacts the agencies with a concern for a child’s well-being the employees have a week to decide if they will follow up the referral or dismiss the case. On average 20 percent of the referrals get dismissed. There are however large differences between the child protection agencies in the rate of dismissal. What can explain the differences in amount of cases dismissed?

One of few studies in Norway occupied with the topic referrals to the child protection agencies are conducted by Kjær and Mossige [1]. They find that the arguments used by the agencies to validate the dismissal of referrals are based on the workplace standards rather than the law and that the decisions to dismiss seem somewhat arbitrary.

Another topical study was conduct in 2011/2012 by the Norwegian supervisory authority. They carried out an inspection of the child protection agencies fulfilment of their obligations. The authority concluded that many referrals to the child protection agencies were too often dismissed. When cases wrongly were dismissed it resulted in children not getting the help they needed. Suggested explanations for the high rate of dismissal were too few employees, inadequate routines and poor follow-up from the managers [2].

In this article I will explore the correlation between the number of referrals to Norwegian child protection agencies and the resources available for each agency. I will use a quantitative approach where the number of educated employees and economical resources are used as explanatory variables.


[1] A.K. Kjær, S. Mossige (2013): Barnevernets henleggelser av meldinger som omhandler vold og seksuelle overgrep, Tidsskrift for familierett, arverett og barnevernrettslige spørsmål, 11(2), p.83-108
[2] Riksrevisjonen (2012): Riksrevisjonenes undersøkelse av det kommunale barnevernet og bruken av statlige virkemidler, Oslo: Fagbokforlaget