The Diverse Impacts of the Neo-liberal Social Policies on Children’s Welfare and Social Work with Young People: The Finnish Perspective

This article discusses the impacts of globalization, neo-liberal social policies and the Finnish economic recession of the 1990s on children's and young people's welfare. It summarises some of the impacts of Finnish social policies on the everyday lives of families with children and highlights some of the features of the recent and current debates surrounding youth delinquency and the societal reactions to young generations. All this contributes to a contradictory and conflicting societal context which challenges experts in the field of child welfare social work experts to operate - as expected - at the right moment, legally and effectively. Instead of being overly-defensive for the ‘good old’ ways of practicing social work with children, the authors invite social work scholars and practitioners to reconceptualise both the concept of children's citizenship and its position both in child welfare theory and practice in the context of children's global rights.

Childrens Participation and Citizenship in a Global Age. Empowerment, Tokenism or Discriminatory Disciplining?

This article explores children’s participation and citizenship, taking its point of departure in the empirical observation of a paradox: On the hand there is a general participatory climate and a growing commitment to empowerment of children, and on the other hand some children’s experience of discrimination, disciplining and distrust. The analysis is structured into three main parts: 1) Participation, approached from Hart’s Ladder of Participation and Bourdieu’s theorizing of power dynamics; 2) Rights, using Marshall’s tripartite conceptualization, namely civil rights, political rights and social rights, supplemented by a discussion of the right to care and cultural rights; and 3) Identity, theorized using Delanty’s conceptualization of citizenship as a learning process The article concludes that children’s citizenship, and the initiatives that are accounted for as facilitating their well being and participation though social work, too often tend towards tokenism if not discriminatory disciplining and exclusion, rather than empowerment, due to political, organisational and discursively shaped power relations.