The research makes visible who are the children placed out-of-home today in Finland. The presentation focuses on two questions: What kinds of services and support interventions the child and family received before the child placed outside the home? In what ways these community-based services were not sufficient, appropriate or available for use?
Main data includes: 1) survey conducted on individual children (N=410). This data consists of institutional knowledge, and it is based on documents, knowledge and assessments available for the social workers (N=116) from eight municipalities who answered the questionnaire. 2) Recorded research conversations with the research partners in seven workshops. The quantitative data were processed with statistical methods. The qualitative data were typified.
Nearly all children had received some service (98 %) prior to placement outside the home. While 15% of the children had received all the services deemed necessary by a social worker, as many as 85% had not received some of the services deemed necessary by a social worker. Variation was big.
Altogether 85% of the children, who were placed outside the home during the study period, had been placed outside the home also the previous year, and nearly every other child had been in emergency placement.
The most common service received by the child and family prior to placement outside the home was support through the school and student welfare services as well as through family work at clients’ home. One in three families received financial support through child welfare services, and one in four families received support for the child’s hobbies.
There were variations in the availability of services the child needed. The most common availability problem concerned the services of support persons, support families or peer groups: the social worker deemed such a service necessary for the child, but the service was not available. The availability of family and individual therapies as well as treatment of substance addiction was quite poor. There were also cases where the child would have needed the services of a professional support person, peer group or family therapy, but these services were not even offered. Peer group activities were not sufficiently available for parents.
15% of the children did not receive the service they needed because either the child or the parents refused the service. This concerned especially individual therapy for the child and young person as well as other forms of therapy, but also treatment of parents’ substance addiction, psychiatric care, and rehabilitation for the whole family. Parents also lacked the motivation to join peer groups.
The social workers evaluated the effectiveness of the services received by the children (assessed if the service had helped the child by improving its situation). Support from school has worked for better for most of the children, also home-help services, family work, supportive child daycare, monetary support and vacation and camp activities had helped the children and improved their situation. Anyhow, these were not always enough.
In 40% of the cases the child would have needed more time from social worker. Working with the family as a whole was devoted the most time, followed by documentation. The larger family seemed to get less involved in case work. The case load was big, and 47% of the cases were emotionally very stressful.
It was just not the individual child and family matters that matters, but also community factors connected to social work. Municipality level were deemed to have impaired the social workers’ conditions to deal with the child’s case in 40% of the cases, while in 15% of the cases they had improved the conditions.
