This issue of ERIS web Journal discusses child welfare. The topic is exceedingly multifaceted and com-plex, comprising both national and international aspects. Due to versatile international collaboration in the field of children’s rights, modern social work with children and families, all over the world, is closely connected with child welfare policies and legislation, enforcing the promotion of children’s rights, pre-venting and alleviating risks as well as enhancing children’s well-being and offering safeguards when necessary.
Every individual society has its own tradition of child welfare policies and practices with different and elaborate country-specific characteristics. At the same time, there are also many similarities in the de-velopment of child protection across countries. Country-specific child welfare systems are influenced by the same economical, political, social and cultural factors as the individual welfare systems in general and, in tandem, by some common attributes that are more difficult to be identified. In today’s world, there are significant international tendencies that affect individual systems of child welfare and bring countries together in child welfare policies, legislation and practices.
Through the ages, human communities have taken care of their children. The idea of child welfare stems from this human attribute. In many European countries, organised child protection came into existence at the end of the 19th century along with the industrialisation and modernisation processes, leading to new kinds of social problems, which weakened the quality of families and communities and their attempts to fulfil their care affairs with children and youngsters. Socialisation was increasingly shattered, and section of the youthl acked the care and education necessary for their health and safety development.
Early child protection activities were developed by enlightened citizens inspired by moral indignation, which was a reaction to children’s misery. Further, the modern system of child protection has been developed as a rational aspiration of modern society to create the best way to grow for all children and alleviate the consequences of child neglect and abuse in both private and social life. In general, these elements of development can be found in every tradition of child welfare, although the nature of social problems and economical, political, social and cultural mechanisms causing the need for child protection vary more or less society by society.
A strong common denominator of modern child welfare policy is the international undertakings in the United Nations. The most influential expressions of this are the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). In these documents, children’s rights are defined as universal human rights concerning especially children; it is a question of a universally agreed set of standards and obligations based on respect for the dignity and worth of each individual child. Unlike the Convention, the Declaration does not obligate the states that have ratified it. Both docu-ments are ratified by nearly all countries. A surprising fact is that the United States is out of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Children’s rights are about social, educational and health policies striving constitutively for meeting children’s basic needs. They aim at securing health, education, equality and safety for every child in varied social orders, legal systems, economical conditions and cultural traditions. With the Convention on the Rights of the Child, national governments are involved in promoting and protecting children’s rights, in terms of being obliged to improve all fields of policies and legislation on the basis of the best interests of the child. As a result, child welfare around the world is strongly influenced by this. Individual countries are obliged to develop systems of health care, education and social services according to the standards set out in the Convention, which also include the commitment of individual countries to organised monitoring.
As a result of the strengthening of this trend, professional social work has increasingly become a judicial endeavour. In many countries, social workers are key players of the professional system of child welfare, an important professional instrument of child welfare policy. The role of social work in the field of child welfare varies significantly among countries. It is largely shaped by the same country-specific factors as the country-specific tradition of child protection. It is the fundamental task of social work research to deal with this diversity and build order in the conceptual and theoretical confusion. Both country-specific and comparative analyses are required for identifying, understanding and explaining the varieties of child welfare traditions and the role of social work therein in theory and practice.
This kind of research is inevitably required for the development of international social work in the field of child protection, which is progressively influenced and challenged by inter-, cross- and supranational factors and must deal with the consequences of globalisation and interconnections of the social condi-tions and needs, in both less developed and more advanced countries. For example, at the turn of the 20th century, member states of the United Nations committed themselves towards decreasing the mortality rate of children and mothers in developing countries by 2015. For social work, as an international professional system, it is important to be an essential and influential part of such international political endeavours in the field of child welfare.
Professor Juha Hämäläinen
University of Eastern Finland