Paper
Discerning European perspectives on evidence-based interventions for vulnerable children and their families
- issue: Issue 1 / 2008
- authors: Hans Grietens
- keywords: Belgium, effectiveness, quality, rights
- views: 3726
- downloaded: 1
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abstract
"Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy" (Margaret Thatcher)
Europe is an old continent consisting of many countries and regions with very different histories, traditions and political systems. Its origin is to be found in mythology rather than in politics. The tragedies performed by the ancient Greeks moulded Europe's soul, gave it a 'felt sense of tragedy' and made it in certain ways unique as compared to other continents.
Romans ruled and 'civilized' the continent for centuries and explored its boundaries from the north to the south and from the east to the west. Europe has a history of bloodshed, power struggles, war, revolutions, and colonialism. It is still healing from the deep wounds created during the Second World War. It has no fixed boundaries and because of its open-endedness it is very sensitive to influences from other continents, especially from America and Asia. However Europe is more than a loose collection of countries bound together by fate and history.
The ideas of Enlightenment have been spread all over Europe and strongly influenced thoughts about religion, culture and education. Social democracy, based on the solidarity among citizens, has made possible for social security and welfare systems to be installed in many countries. Out of the ruins at the end of the Second World War, the European Union was born and its development has been continuing up today. New countries share the models underlying the Union without loosing their own identity or ignoring their history and traditions. Europe is by definition multi-linguistic, an ethnic melting pot and a cultural mosaic.
When talking about child and family welfare in Europe and looking for European perspectives on interventions for vulnerable children and families, we have to keep in mind the continent's multifaceted nature. Indeed, an exploration of Europe's child and family welfare systems learns that they are different, for instance with regard to political structure, involvement of the Church, relations between state and care system, etc. Further, key concepts in welfare like 'family', 'citizen', 'care', 'fostering', 'residential', or 'out-of-home placement' may have local connotations and meanings.
The question arises on whether a common language or a typically European 'flavour' can be found throughout the heterogeneity. Is there any commonality in the way countries in Europe deal with the vulnerable children and families they are faced with? Are workers inspired by the same frameworks and theories? Are there European standards of what good practice could be and does it make sense to work out tools which help European practitioners share knowledge and inform practice?
We try to provide an answer to these questions and related ones by picking out and contextualizing some milestones in the history of child and family welfare and by making a brief journey throughout Europe to check our interpretations, identify similar perspectives and point to differences.
We start our analysis some twenty years ago and structure it by using three key issues referring to underlying paradigms which have dominated this period: rights, quality, and evidence.
In 1989 (November, 20), a so crucial year in Europe's recent history, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child into international law as an advisory resolution. Since this date, governments all over Europe have made the Convention to an instrument giving voice to children, safeguarding their security and helping them to empower and become autonomous and participating human beings. The Convention has been implemented to protect their rights and particular attention has been given to vulnerable groups of minors, including children at risk and in care (Gutbrandsson, 2006).
The implementation goes on with instruments being refined and new countries entering the European Union stimulated to work out guidelines and protocols to safeguard their children and protect them from abuse and neglect. The Convention on the Rights of the Child in Europe clearly hasn't been fully implemented yet. It continues and focuses on children in the field of prevention, juvenile justice and child protection (van Bueren, 2008). An issue related to the Convention and binding together countries in Europe is the struggle against violence towards children, either in the family or the school.
The Council of Europe launched the programme 'Building a Europe for and with children' and aims to ban the corporal punishment of children at home, at school, in care institutions or in places of detention and to respect their human dignity and physical integrity (Council of Europe, 2007). An increasing number of countries is following this intention and is legally banning within their jurisdiction the corporal punishment of children.
In addition to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, during the '90s many countries in Europe have started to pay attention to the quality of help provided to vulnerable children and their families. Policy makers have developed quality decrees. They have put these into practice by specifying criteria which needed to be fulfilled in order for help to be evaluated and labelled 'sufficient' or, in terms of its users, 'satisfying'. Quality criteria deal with infrastructure, provision, organization, management and help. Clients are as much as possible involved in the evaluations. The quality criteria have to be considered as minimal conditions necessary to guarantee good enough living and care. In case they are not fulfilled services can be sanctioned or in case children are in danger they can even be closed. In many countries, services need by law to have a quality co-ordinator. This staff member often takes a key position in the organizational structure. Making quality visible and realizing the criteria needed to be recognized as a 'qualified' service required many efforts from all workers in the organisation, including training and professionalism. As with children's rights, new member states within Europe are encouraged to develop quality care guidelines, make them visible for workers and clients and evaluate what is the quality of the care that is provided.
Finally, about ten years ago, the evidence-based paradigm entered the field of child and family welfare. Having its origin in the field of medicine, this paradigm states that all interventions for children and families need to have proven their evidence and be tested using rigorous scientific criteria before they can be put into practice.
The entrance of this paradigm caused a shift and, as the children's rights and quality of care paradigms, it created a new language and new opportunities for communication among researchers, practitioners and policy makers. It re-opened dialogue between parties involved but, unfortunately, also created misunderstandings, disbelief and sometimes even panic.
This may have to do with reluctance and sometimes also with the too straightforward ways in which 'evidence' and the methods by which it can be proven have been defined in the past. How is Europe dealing with this latest paradigm? We will present some cases - each from a different country within Europe - to exemplify how the paradigm brought change, for instance in the relationships between theory and practice or between policy and practice. The cases show that there are similarities (e.g., similar theories upon which interventions are based) and differences (e.g., in the way evidence is considered) between countries and that Europe follows its own history of ideas (e.g., de-constructivism) and to a certain extent goes its own way towards an evidence-based care for vulnerable children and their families.
We conclude that it is at this moment too early to talk about 'European' perspectives on evidence-based interventions for vulnerable children and families. We see that common perspectives are growing and believe that scientific associations like iaOBERfcs and Eusarf may have a major role to play here. The evidence-based paradigm, however, does not stand alone. If considered as an isolated phenomenon, we tend to ignore some other basic dimensions of care 'evidence-based working' should include in order to reach its aims, like 'cultural sensitivity', 'complexity', 'quality of life', 'reflection' and maybe even 'ethics'. It may therefore be useful to link together the three paradigms we based our analysis upon. Doing this brings us to a model - an integrative 'best interests of children and families' pyramid (see Figure 1) - which can be helpful 1) to better understand what good care for vulnerable children and their families may be, 2) to strengthen the links between theory, practice and policy, and 3) to generate new research questions and methodologies for future studies.
Key references
Council of Europe (2007). Eliminating corporal punishment. A human rights imperative for Europe's children (2nd edition). Strasbourg: Author.
Gutbrandsson, B. (2006). Rights of children at risk and in care. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.
van Bueren, G. (2008). Child rights in Europe. Strasbourg: Council of Europe.
Contacts: Hans Grietens, Centre for Parenting, Child Welfare & Disabilities, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Vesaliusstraat 2, 3000 Leuven (B), Hans.Grietens@ped.kuleuven.be