engleski

Ostvarivanje participativnih prava djece u alternativnoj skrbi

Children’s participation became widely recognised in professional and general public in last decade. Many international and national laws, strategic documents and policies were created to describe, prescribe, and promote children’s participation. General impression is that, regardless relatively well normative organization, participation of children is still area of many misconceptions and not fully implemented in everyday life of children. Children and young people in the alternative care system are one of the groups of children whose voice is "seldomly heard". The term "seldomly heard children " refers to those children and young people who have fewer opportunities to participate and who face more obstacles when they want to participate. In addition, these children grow up in public care, or as Brown and Seita (2009) put it in “care of strangers” which increases their vulnerability and at the same time further enhances the importance of their participation, in terms of obtaining adequate information on the course of care, opportunities to participate in decisions important for their life and care, impact on the quality of care, etc. Larkins, Kiili, and Palsanen (2014) distinguish between individual and collective participation of children in the alternative care system. Individual participation refers to the participation of an individual child in the care process, especially in relation to decisions related to his / her course of care, while collective participation refers to the participation of children from alternative care as an interest group seeking change and participating in policy decisions and public childcare practices. Research shows that children in alternative care have rich experience of non-participation: children don’t receive any information concerning their placement (or wrong information) and they often feel like they are an object (a not a person). Professionals (adults) often speak the language of participatory rights but support paternalistic ideology” (Duncan, 2019), so there is a need for holistic approach where children's opinions and children's participation are equally integrated into the culture and structure of institutions. Child participation should be an organizational value (participation ethos). Therefore, there is a need for development of organization structures to support child participation: creating child participation strategy and action plan, as well as appoint adults (professionals) who will mentor and support children.

participatory rights, alternative care

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