”Alltså, jag jobbar med vuxna människor...” - En kvalitativ studie om hur barnperspektivet inkluderas vid handläggningen av ekonomiskt bistånd

Sammanfattning: Many studies show that children are negatively affected by the consequences of growing up in a family relying on long-term economic support. Despite this, the children’s perspective is flawed in the process of administrating financial aid. The outset during our study has been, from our own experience, that the application of the children’s perspective differs depending on which clientele the parents belong to. This potential difference could mean a legal uncertainty, which we consider to be highly relevant to investigate. The purpose of this paper is to enlighten the children’s perspective during the administration of financial aid to families relying on long-term economic support, to analyse how social workers state that they use the children’s perspective in these cases. Based on the purpose, we examined how social workers use their scope of action to include the children’s perspective when administrating financial aid, also if they included the children’s perspective differently depending on which clientele the parents belonged to. The study was performed with the help of a qualitative method in the form of semi-structured interviews with six social workers from the section of financial aid in an urban area of Malmö. The empirical data collected from the interviews were analysed from different perspectives, which then reconnected to the current state of knowledge and the theories Organisations-theory for public sectors and Street-Level Bureaucracy. From our findings we concluded that the difference in how the children’s perspective was included depending on which clientele the parents belonged to was non-existent. Instead, the findings showed that the children’s perspective was entirely missing. The respondents claimed, in different ways, that they tried to meet the children’s needs, but in the end, the needs of the children did not affect the outcome of the decisions. Therefore, one can argue that there is a legal certainty in the process, since the children’s perspective is not included in the administration of financial aid at all. Concurrently, the legal certainty means that the children’s perspective is not included at all. Furthermore, the respondents imply that there is room to include the children’s perspective in their scope of action. However, in doing so it creates a paradox since their guidelines, norms and laws constrain them to a point to which the scope of action no longer exists.