Våldsutsatta LVU-placerade barns umgänge med sina föräldrar - att köpslå om barnets bästa? : En kvalitativ studie av socionomers upplevelse av sitt handlingsutrymme i bedömningar gällande LVU-placerade barns umgänge med sina föräldrar

Sammanfattning: Being a social worker in a child and family-oriented unit means that through their position within an organization, a certain scope of action has been allocated. The scope of action creates a choice, but also entails a requirement to take responsibility and to take a stand. The purpose of the study is to investigate how social workers discuss their room for action in assessments regarding interaction between placed children and their guardians where the child is subjected to domestic violence, based on prevailing laws, guidelines, professional knowledge, client needs and research. We hope to achieve a in-depth understanding how these factors affect the scope for action of social workers in these cases. Through interviews with social workers working within the child and family unit as well as family home care, we intended to gain insight into their experiences and reasoning about the scope for action and how this is impacting on their assessments and decisions.The results of our study shows that the social workers do have a considerable scope of action in these kinds of cases, although some individuals choose to look at it as something more static, while others see it as something more dynamic. It appears that the general reunification principle (word for word translation) is very dominant in the daily life of social workers and affects their decisions. This despite the fact that the group we were investigating are divergent compared to the general group of placed children, which therefore should be exempt in certain cases, given the research that is available. Despite the complexity of the cases, there are no direct tendencies among social workers to fall into excessive bureaucracy in their behavior to manage their professional role. Based on the interviewer'sexperiences and reasoning, the best interest of the child, entails extremely complex assessments. From the reasonings of the interviewees’ we can see a clear parental perspective, that can partly depend on all the perspectives that a social worker has to take in consideration in their decisions, and partly on the strong parental right that is taught in Sweden. The result also shows that it is difficult for research to assimilate the assessments, which mainly depends on organizational reasons.