To Örebro University

In Sweden, a child who has experienced child abuse, can be interviewed by the police without the parents’ knowledge or consent. Afterwards, the parents receive the information from both the police and the social services. About thirty percentage of the children are taken care of immediately after the interview, while the rest are going home to their parents. Social work professionals acknowledged the importance of giving support to families after the police interview, as a crisis can occur in these kinds of situations. Therefore, a model has been developed, called After the child interview [Efter barnförhöret] (ACI). This study reports the interim findings from a program-theory evaluation of ACI: what interventions have been conducted after finishing ACI and what are the characteristics of these interventions? How many children have been taken care of by the social service after finishing ACI, and how many children have been reported to the social services again after the case has been closed? Data consists of social investigations, which we analyze quantitatively and qualitatively. In all, we will collect 200 investigations; 100 where ACI has been used, and 100 where ASI has not been used. Thus, we can compare these two groups. The work of collecting and analyzing social investigations is ongoing, and there are no results yet. What we can see from early processing of data, is that many cases are very complex and the families are often known by the social services for many reasons, not just child abuse. Very few children seem to be taken care of by the authorities, while many have been reported to the social services again.

I Sverige går majoriteten av de barn som varit på förhör på grund av misstanke om barnmisshandel hem till sina föräldrar och misstänkta förövare utan hjälp eller stöd från samhället. Efter barnförhöret (EBF) ären modell för stöd och information till barn och föräldrar vid misstanke om barnmisshandel. Som en del i ett större forskningsprojekt undersöker vi familjebehandlares erfarenheter av att arbeta med EBF samt dess styrkor och svagheter.

In Sweden, a child who has experienced child abuse, can be interviewed by the police without the parents’ knowledge or consent. Afterwards, the parents receive the information from both the police and the social services. About thirty percentage of the children aret aken care of immediately after the interview, while the rest are going home to their parents. Social work professionals acknowledged the importance of giving support to amilies after the police interview, as a crisis can occur in these kinds of situations. Therefore, a model has been developed, called After the child interview [Efter barnförhöret] (ACI). This study reports the interim findings from a program-theory evaluation of ACI: how do family therapists experience working with ACI and how does the model meet the challenges when dealing with the complexity of child abuse? We focus on strengths and weaknesses of the ACI, as identified by the family therapists, and the potential changes the model resulted in for the families involved. The findings indicate that ACI motivates families to accept further help from the social services, and that it benefits the child’s perspective on violence. Organizational limits keep professionals from using the model to the extent they desire, and there are also several local adaptions made, which may influence the outcome of the model. Practical implications for the model as well as practice will be presented as well.