Children’s Right to Participation

Children’s right to participate in matters affecting them is a fundamental right in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is an unequivocal principle that at the outset should be fairly straightforward for governments, the judiciary and public authorities to implement and realize, and especially in the child protection system in which the reason for state interventions is the best interests of the child. Still, reports from children themselves and research shows that children are not involved and do not participate as the Convention and the laws prescribe. The question that must be answered is why this is the case, and how to fulfill the legal requirement and political ambition of children’s participation in the child protection system.

PARTICIPATION is a collaborative knowledge project with ambitions to make groundbreaking steps in the understanding and implementation of children’s participatory rights. It is a partnership between researchers at the University of Bergen, DIPA-Centre, and four partners from the child protection system: 1) The County Social Welfare Boards, 2) The Norwegian Courts and their Administration, 3) Bergen municipality and 4) The Change Factory (Expert by Experience). By bringing together different perspectives, knowledge, and experiences – and studying organizational practices, the primary objective of PARTICIPATION is to generate new knowledge, develop new measures, and build research expertise that enables society to address the challenge of children’s participation. The secondary objectives are to (1) map and examine the exiting situation on children’s participation at three levels of the child protection system in Norway, (2) find out what promotes and hinders decision makers involvement of children, by pursuing three explanatory dimensions – individual characteristics, organizational and institutional features, and features with the children, and (3) develop and test new programs for the involvement of children, by building on the knowledge platform provided by the theoretical and empirical research.

The Child Equality Perspective (CEP) forms the theoretical foundation of the project, and The Child Participatory Action Research (CPAR) secures children’s active involvement throughout the project.