Negotiating Responsibility: Professionals' Perspectives on Separated Parents' Protective Duties in the Swedish Context

Abstract

This study explores how social workers perceive and enact informal protective arrangements in the context of Swedish child protection. Drawing on group interviews with practitioners, the findings reveal that social workers underline parents' legal obligation and duty to protect their children, which means that the safe parent is expected to restrict the child's contact with the parent deemed at risk. Therefore, child protection is framed less as a matter of social services' formal mandate and accountability and more as a process of informal handling through a parent's responsibility. Social workers describe themselves as constrained by legal frameworks and therefore reliant on parents' protective resources, which they activate by attributing, advising and ‘passing back’ responsibility. This is analysed as a cyclical process of negotiation in which the responsibility for protecting due to a power imbalance rests with the safe parent but without formal support, reflecting ongoing responsibilization trends. The study highlights how responsibility is distributed, resisted and negotiated in everyday interactions between social workers and parents and how protective parents may experience isolation and vigilance when implementing restrictions. The informal nature of protection measures based on parents' duty to protect suggests the emergence of ‘grey zones’ in child welfare.