Emotional kinship care and neutral non-kinship care - the struggle between discourses

Summary, in English

In this paper, social workers' ideas of kinship care and non-kinship care as foster placement alternatives for vulnerable children are analysed and discussed. The study is based on group interviews with Swedish social workers, using a discourse analytic approach. The interviews took two vignettes of children who needed an immediate and long-term placement because one of the parents had killed the other parent, as their point of departure. Domestic violence is a common social problem across countries, and controversies about placement alternatives become even more apparent when discussing lethal violence. The analysis revealed three main discourses: ‘emotional kinship care’, ‘neutral non-kinship care’ and ‘a real family’. The emotional kinship care discourse also revealed two competing sub-discourses: ‘emotions as glue that binds’ and ‘emotions as obscuring a child perspective’, displaying a struggle concerning the advantages and risks that social workers connected to kinship care. In this paper, the results and their implications for vulnerable children are discussed.

• Author: Lina Ponnert
• Department/s: School of Social Work
• Publishing year: 2017-05
• Language: English
• Pages: 1084-1093
• Publication/Series: Child & Family Social Work
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 2
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cfs.12328
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Topic: Social Work
• Keywords: children in care system; discourse analysis; foster care; kinship care; social work; violence
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1356-7500