This article is a discursive examination of children’s status as knowledgeable moral agents within the Swedish child welfare system and in the widely used assessment framework BBIC. Departing from Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, three discursive positions of children’s moral status are identified: amoral, im/moral and dis/loyal. The findings show the undoubtedly moral child as largely missing and children’s agency as diminished, deviant or rendered ambiguous. Epistemic injustice applies particularly to disadvantaged children with difficult experiences who run the risk of being othered, or positioned as reproducing or accommodating to the very same social problems they may be victimised by.

This study explores the pivotal role of the body for political recognition and rights claims in child welfare “moral” interventions. I examine how the bodily figures in child welfare assessments, linking these manifestations to the concept of the moral economy of care. A sample of assessment reports from a Swedish municipality, all addressing violations of children’s bodies or integrity, are used as empirical material. I show how the psychosomatically suffering child is being best “heard” as vulnerable. I also argue that such a moral economy of care silences children’s accounts of gendered and racial injustices. Furthermore, racialized moral divides are indicated when assessments of different child bodies are considered. A concluding remark points to a need for a child welfare moral economy of social justice that responds to structural intersecting injustices in childhoods, including to those of a racialized child welfare and its individualized and symptom-oriented services.

Using the metaphors body and voice and drawing on critical contributions on biopolitics, this article interrogates children’s participation rights in a knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’. With child welfare and protection practice as an empirical example, I analyse written assessment reports from a Swedish child welfare agency, all exemplifying how social workers evidence needs for protection and reasons for removing children from the home. I discuss how ‘evidencing’ equals a knowledge culture of seeing-believing and predicting-believing and the search for visibly damaged bodies and underdeveloped minds. I furthermore problematise how such conceptualisation of evidencing foregrounds children’s ‘speaking’ bodies while silencing their voices. By showing these manifestations of evidencing, this critical contribution discusses some wider epistemic concerns for fields influenced by the knowledge cultures of ‘the evidence-based’.

While temporality has been addressed in the context of child welfare, the temporal dimensions of differentiation and othering remain unacknowledged. This article draws on material from a Swedish child welfare agency and is theoretically inspired by postcolonial and queer theories and critical childhood studies. It is based on an analytical juxtaposition of care order applications recommending immediate child welfare interventions versus interventions that are recommended after long ongoing assessments. Such recommendations are addressed as unequal in terms of timing. The article discusses temporal themes related to permanency versus temporary, which guide assessments of changeability. I show how immediate interventions respond to chronicity—the temporality of incurability, permanency, and underdevelopment. However, social problems in long ongoing assessments are assessed as permanent only after long ongoing observations or passage of time. The article discusses how ideas about change reproduce wider societal and intersecting inequalities. This becomes visible when considering time as allocated to parents and their potential to bring about change. I argue that even though permanency differs from chronicity, it still limits a discussion about change as societal, and the detection of problems remains within a developmentalist and neoliberal framework. In the concluding remarks, I offer an alternative reading of allocated time that can manoeuvre developmentalist logics, while balancing responsibilisation between the individual and the society.

This article offers a rethinking of protection based on synthesised data from Finland and Sweden on children’s and mothers’ experiences of post-separation stalking, and social workers’ case reports on children risking exposure to gender-based violence after separation. Drawing on critical childhood studies and a feminist approach to violence and security, we ask how children’s everyday lives can be incorporated in a rethinking of protection for children in post-separation contexts. Departing from identified limitations in protective solutions for children, we propose three ways of rethinking the issue of protection: (1) protection as gender- and power sensitivity, (2) protection as securitising the here and now, and (3) protection as social peace. Our findings call for some changes in professional practices, social policy and legislation.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Protective solutions to the problem of gender-based violence in post separation are limited, if existing at all, for exposed children.</li><br /><li>Orientation towards adults and therapy desecuritise childhoods and children’s social peace.</li></ul>