PARTICIPATION OF PARENTS IN THE CHILD PROTECTION SYSTEM

This article explores the ways in which parents perceives, experience and negotiate participation in and interventions of child protection system. Based on review of qualitative studies focused on parents’ views, it shows the importance of worker-parent relationship and system-parent approach. The ways how parents perceive workers and themselves in different moments of child protection processes isshown to be the primary influence shaping parents’ reactions to interventions(including decision not to cooperate).Parents who experienced helpful, participative, respectful and relatively fair interventions tended to cooperate with child protection workers. As a result positive engagement of parents in child protection system isproposed.