Child protection services in Sweden: experiences of Nigerian parents in Sweden

Abstract

The global issue of child protection is of paramount importance in the social work profession. Child protection, parenting styles, corporal punishments and child abuse are interconnected issues which confronts daily family life relationships. Thus, adapting pre-emptive measures for altered patterns of abuse against a child. The existence of child abuse and the use of corporal punishment as a form of discipline led to the development of global and national laws of protecting a child which are being monitored by child protection practitioners. Based on this, how the practitioners and social actors involved in protecting a child intervenes in the family, remains the driving focus of this research. Also, the research aims to ascertain the experiences of Nigerian parents on Swedish child protection service, and to evaluate the challenges and possibilities that can arise while working with the professionals. To achieve this, three research questions; 1) How do interviewed Nigerian parents perceive the intervention process of the child protection service in Sweden according to their experiences?, 2) What are the challenges interviewed Nigerian parents encounter while working with the child protection professionals?, 3) How can the intervention process of child protection in Sweden be enhanced? Formed the fulcrum upon which this study stands, while the exploratory instrumental case study was adopted as the research design used to develop an understanding of five specific cases of parents encounter with social workers in Sweden. Hence, this research presents an explanation of the different frameworks to child protection in Nigeria and Sweden. It further explores literatures on parenting, emergence of the Swedish ban on corporal punishment and the social work intervention process with principles that can guide social workers in their activities with families and children. The research takes the qualitative method with the use of semi-structured interviews which are analysed using the thematic analysis. There are seven (7) themes that were coded and analysed from the findings with focus on the experiences of the interviewed parents which presents a substantial discussion to theoretical approaches and previous research. The research findings reveal a strong link between social work educations, social work research and field practice in working with families and children in a multicultural context, communication gap between expatriate parents and relevant agencies responsible for child protection as obtainable in Sweden, and parents detest as being seen as defaulters of the law on child protection due to the negative image that accompanies it among others.