Abstract
Social and legal protection of children can be approached from two general positions. The first is expert discourse in the form of various scientific schools or epistemic communities and the other is the position of public opinion. The purpose of this study is to show both the coexistence and potential contradictory nature of these two approaches on selected current issues of social and legal protection of children (boundary of criminal liability, institutional or protective care and replacement care of parentless children). While mapping the expert discourse is based on scientific knowledge of the issue, mapping the public opinion uses data of a representative inquiry aimed at the study of opinions of the Czech population in 2015 (n = 1.050). The study concludes that though public opinion and expert discourse regarding the replacement care of parentless children are to some extent in agreement, there is a difference of opinion on the boundary of criminal liability and institutional or protective care of children and youth with problematic behaviour.
Highlights
Social and legal protection of children is laid down in Czech law in the 1998 legislative Act No 359/1999 Coll. (2016)
The second is the public opinion, the popular discourse, produced by various social groups defined by heterogeneous socio-demographic features, such as social status, education or age, and which may take individual standpoints to the issues of social and legal protection of children
Public opinion is important for social policy formation as it exerts pressure on political representation through media and various interest groups by which the political agenda of the social state is affected
Summary
Social and legal protection of children is laid down in Czech law in the 1998 legislative Act No 359/1999 Coll. (2016). That is despite the fact that this is the very public opinion that is one of the key agents driving construction of social problems (Best, 2008; Loseke, 1999; Spector & Kitsuse, 1977, Stone, 2011) – i.e., deciding how relevant they are, whether they shall be addressed and, if so, how This role of public opinion leads certain authors (see, for example, Dearing & Everett, 1996; McCombs, 2009; Škodová & Nečas, 2009) to the conclusion that public opinion, formed into a certain thematic agenda, represents an important force affecting political and state decision-making, which may result in the deduction that even the agendas of social policy and socio-pedagogical work are affected. The role of professional discourse and public opinion (popular discourse) will be demonstrated in a couple of problematic issues surrounding social and legal protection of children and subjected to recent public discussion with legislative intervention These issues are represented by the boundary of criminal liability and the related orders of institutional or protective care and subsequent replacement care
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