Family Ruptures and Un-Belonging: Discomfort in the Norwegian Child Welfare and Migrant Minority Families

Abstract

This chapter responds to a heated political debate on the Norwegian Child Welfare Services, with a focus on migrant minority families who report fear that child welfare will ‘steal’ their children and ruin their family, thus violating a sense of belonging and wellbeing. Based on in-depth interviews with parents and child welfare workers, and inspired by critical phenomenology, the chapter reveals experiences of discomfort and un-belonging. Feelings of discomfort, as well as feelings of belonging and wellbeing, are not only products, but also ‘do’ things in child welfare as they mobilise actions, decisions, and interpretations, and are thus lively actants in the service process. Keeping in mind the assessment management guiding childcare workers, making and sustaining family and home are at stake here, and yet a sense of discomfort and un-belonging is created among migrant families because their views, narratives, and truth are largely neglected. In addition, many childcare workers experience a ‘gnawing feeling’, which in turn plays a role in many child welfare workers’ experience of discomfort in their practice. I suggest that turning towards a concern for affections and feelings can be a way forward to gain migrant minority families’ trust, and to support central experiences of family, home, and belonging, as well as to sustain social justice and integrity in future child welfare services.