The Norwegian child protection services in stormy weather

Abstract

By examining children as symbols within a Norwegian context and, further, as icons in a larger Western context, the article shows how these ways of understanding children give the Norwegian child protection system both its strength and its potential to misuse power. It is clear that, today, there exist in Norway children whose experiences contravene hegemonic understandings of children. Many of these children encounter child protection professionals who seek to provide them with childhoods in keeping with the Norwegian consensus about how children should be and how childhood should be lived. The situations of such children are often interpreted with reference to two universal images: one involving the discourse of children’s rights; and the other involving the discourse of psychosocial rehabilitation. These images need to be changed in order to fit the realities of children’s own subjectivity, opportunities and material conditions of life.