Child protection investigations of child custody cases in Norway: caseworkers’ obstacles and coping strategies

Abstract

In Norway, Child Protection Services (CPS) is responsible for investigating concerns about children at risk of being harmed by their parents' conflicts. This study focuses on caseworkers' experiences of investigating cases involving long-lasting custody disputes between parents, and presents the findings of qualitative research engaging 31 CPS caseworkers. CPS is required to investigate cases involving parental conflicts, and the findings show that caseworkers consider custody disputes to be harmful to children. Many of these families have had limited experience with public services before the marriage breakdown, and parents give contradicting stories about their situation to caseworkers. Consequently, caseworkers are pushed to position children as key informants, which violates the child participation principles set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. These children are, moreover, described as loyal to their parents, and often refuse to participate. The data analysis draws on Lipsky's concept of 'street-level bureaucracy' to shed light on how caseworkers manage conflicting goals and demands when conducting investigations. The findings suggest that a system needs to be developed to provide caseworkers with resources and knowledge to help them investigate and to work with these complex family situations in a better way. KEYWORDS Child custody disputes; child protection services; investigations; assessments; coping strategiesEach year, 20,000 children in Norway experience parental separation and divorce. In approximately 10% of these families, children are exposed to long-term conflicts between their separated parents, who may disagree on issues of residence, contact arrangements, and child-rearing, or who may have concerns about the other adult's parenting abilities, mental health issues, potential for violence, and drug misuse (Bergman and Rejmer 2017). Such conflicts, or parental disputes, may involve a high degree of emotional reactivity, and the parents' interactions can be driven by their hurt feelings, anger, disappointment, blame, hostility, and desire for revenge (Anderson et al. 2010). Sometimes, both parents bear significant responsibility for creating and maintaining the conflict, whereas at other times one of the parents might be the primary initiator (Birnbaum and Bala 2010). Parents may also react to conflicts in different ways, so that either one, or both, of the parents may engage in problematic behaviours including avoidance and verbal aggression. They may, finally, draw the child into the conflict, prevent the child from seeing the other parent, solicit the child's support against the other parent, and/or sabotage contact arrangements (Bergman and Rejmer 2017; Rhoades 2008).Long-term conflicts between parents might expose children to excessive levels of stress, putting them at risk for developing anger, aggression, depression, anxiety, school problems, and difficulties in relationships with their peers and parents (Camisasca et al. 2017;Harold and Sellers 2018;