Inclusion-Exclusion: Listening to Parents Whose Children Were Removed to an Emergency Center

Background and Purpose: Two dominant discourses can be identified in social work practice concerning parents in child protection. The first emphasizes parent/family pathology, positioning social workers as responsible for assessing the extent to which children are at risk, to ensure their safety, including removal from the home. The second discourse, highlights the central role of parents in children’s lives, the social oppression, perceiving social work practice as need to be collaborative, empowering the utilization of parental strengths.

The present study adds a layer to the understanding of parents’ relation with social workers following the removal of their children to an emergency center. The research questions guiding this study are: How do parents perceive and experience the process and rationale for the removal of their child from the home to an emergency center? How do parents perceive the functioning of, and their relationships with, social workers at different stages of the child removal process?

Methods: The present qualitative study is grounded in a hermeneutic perspective, which seeks to reflects on the subjective meanings' individuals attribute to their lived experiences. The study comprised 15 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nine mothers and six fathers, aged 32 to 56. At the time of the interviews, their children had been residing in an emergency center for a period ranging from three to six months. Data were analyzed using a qualitative thematic approach, aim for identifying, analyzing patterns (themes), the core meanings embedded within the data.

Findings: A central theme that emerged from the interviews, “Parenting on the Brink of the Abyss,” captures parents' profound feelings of helplessness, accompanied by a painful awareness of their perceived failure to provide adequate parental, financial, and emotional support. Their children’s difficulties further intensified these feelings of inadequacy, reinforcing a sense of deficiency, failure, and threat to the self, in tension with their desire to be “good parents.” During the child removal process, parents reported expecting their relationships with social workers to be characterized by emotional containment, support, partnership, and collaborative problem-solving. However, the dominant experience is negative, marked by a lack of trust and insufficient understanding, which in turn exacerbated their distress and negative emotional experiences.

Conclusion and Implications: The findings of this study are a starting point for reflecting the attitude toward parents' voices. On the one hand, attending to parents’ voice may challenge the reification of social workers’ authority, enhance empathic understanding, and support the development of empowerment based on mutually intersubjective, democratic and equitable relationships. On the other hand, parents’ accounts may be interpreted as justificatory narratives or ethical rationalizations that could undermine efforts to safeguard children’s well-being.

The discussion will develop a dialectical perspective, aiming to transform: the tension between: inclusion parents’ as existential subject and exclusion-social workers ethical and professional responsibility to ensure children welfare.