"Människor i kris kan ju inte jobba med förändring" : En kvalitativ studie om hur socialsekreterare resonerar kring föräldrars rätt till stöd när deras barn omhändertagits enligt LVU

Sammanfattning: Authors: Emma Nilsson and Emma Silverberg Title: People in a crisis are not able to work with change Supervisor: Helene Hansen Assessor: Mikael Sandgren The aim of this study was to examine social workers reasoning on social services support to parents of children placed in compulsory care. This study was based on the Swedish social services law, 6:7 Socialtjänstlagen, that describes that parents are entitled to support when their child is placed in foster care. Previous research shows that parents experience a lack of support by social workers and that the support system is in need of improvement. There were seven participants in this study who all work in Skåne, Sweden. Six of them are social workers who works with investigating children in need of support as well as their families and one participant is working as a head of a department in social services. All participants have been interviewed with qualitative semi-structured interviews. The empirical data has been analysed based on organizational structure, theory of recognition and the theory of crisis. The results showed that social services have guidelines that states that parents have the right to receive support. However, there are no guidelines that describes how this support should be either designed or offered to the parents. The study showed that not every parent is offered support by social workers due to lack of formal structures. The participants of this study emphasized difficulties in balancing the conflicting perspectives from the child and the parents in their daily work. They expressed a need of developing the social services support to parents, in the form of parents having their own social worker who can offer emotional support throughout the process, as the parents is described going through a crisis as their child is being placed in foster care by compulsory care. Current support to parents is directed towards changes in their parental abilities in order for them to reunite with their child. Based on the theory of crisis, this study showed that changes that are required is not possible to achieve unless the parents primarily, with support from social workers, get an opportunity to process the grief and crisis that occurs when their child is being placed in compulsory care. Key words: theory of crisis, children in foster care, parents in crisis, compulsory care, social workers, social services, law of social work, 6:7 SoL