Background: This study explores how a child's celiac disease (CD) influences the daily life

Decisions about child protection and interventions in families are one of the most difficult responsibilities of welfare states. The aim of this article is to describe and analyse the commonalities and differences in the child protection decision-making systems in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. We focus on the actors involved, especially the laypersons, and their role in the decision-making process when deciding on out-ofhome placements, both on voluntary and coercive grounds.The study is based on a comprehensive analysis of official documents, legislation, guidelines, and reports about child protection in each country together with a review of recent research in the area. This is complemented by 12 interviews with key informants with knowledge about the child protection systems in their respective countries.We found that there is an expanding influence from external experts and dwindling influence from laypersons. We discuss the organisation in terms of three different decision-making modelsa professionalised decision-making model in Finland, a hybrid decision-making model in Norway and Denmark, and a layperson decision-making model in Sweden. One conclusion is that all of the countries aim for children to be involved and for decisions to be made in compliance with the rule of law, but this is realised quite differently when it comes to which actors should be given the authority to make the decisions. Which model is the best would have different answers depending on which perspective the models are evaluated from. However, the consequences of decisionmaking models for children need to be studied further.

The question for this study was to further understand how children and youths with intellectual disabilities (IDs) provide central and peripheral details when interviewed about their abuse experiences. Through a quantitative method we examined police officers' first formal investigative interviews with 32 children and youths with IDs. We analyzed the details they reported about abuse in relation to types of questions asked. The findings showed that few open-ended invitations were used and that a large number of option-posing questions were asked. The children and youths tended to agree with option-posing and suggestive statements but were nonetheless able to report important information about their abuse experiences without the 'help' from these potentially contaminating questions. The results of this study are limited because of the selective nature of the sample and that we did not have access to complete information about the participants specific diagnosis. Although it shows that police officers need to provide children and youths with IDs greater opportunities to report details using open-ended invitations. If they do not develop their responses when asked open-ended invitations they may be asked open directive questions to facilitate the elicitation of both central and peripheral information.

According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Swedish legislation, children have the right to participate in child protection proceedings. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the notion of age and maturity in child protection proceedings in order to elucidate how these aspects could influence children's rights to participate. We focus on the view of three groups of actors involved in child protection proceedings in Sweden—social workers, lawyers, and laypersons in social welfare boards and administrative courts—and on how children's age and maturity should be taken into consideration in decisions on their participation in court. The analysis is based on survey data. The study found that social workers, laypersons, and lawyers have different views on when children are old enough to have the right to litigate in court. Additionally, there is no consensus on how the maturity of the child can be assessed to inform the decision about participation. More discussion is needed about what competences a child needs to participate in court and to what extent this right should be limited by their age. Importantly, courts and decision‐making proceedings can be made more child friendly.

Constructions of institutional identities are necessary when assessing children's needs and making intervention decisions. To be able to make holistic descriptions of children's identities, social workers have to listen to children's perceptions of themselves and their surroundings. In this study we explore how social workers construct children's identities when portraying the children's perceptions in social investigations conducted according to the BBIC model when concerns have been expressed about the children's health. Inspired by a discursive analytical approach, we focused on the language used.We analysed descriptions of children's perceptions in 35 written investigations. We found that in terms of words used, the children's perceptions were given greater attention than those of parents and others (e.g. teachers, doctors). When focusing on the quality of these constructions, the main patterns found were that social workers more frequently submitted non-explanatory rather than explanatory descriptions.We also found that social workers differ in the way they handle the task of reporting children's voices. These findings indicate that the use of the BBIC manual needs to be developed to ensure children are not just listened to and their perceptions described, but also that children are constructed as agents of their life. To obtain a holistic view of children's life-world, there is a need of identity descriptions that include details of how children understand their problems, what they experience as positive and what is acceptable support for them.