For two days, representatives from the Allmänna Barnhuset Foundation, BRIS, Friends, Ommej, World Childhood Foundation, the Swedish Crime Victims' Agency, the Swedish Prison and Probation Service, SiS, SKR, Örebro Municipality, Jönköping University, the Government Offices and the Office of the Minister of Social Services gathered at Sätra Bruk. The purpose was to discuss children's rights and how our systems actually work in practice. The conversations were unusually honest and there was a clear consensus about what is not working today.
What came back to everyone, regardless of role or activity, was how the child's everyday life is not reflected in how our systems are organized. Each actor starts from their own mission, their legislation and their requirements, and often does a lot of work within their own part. But the child's life does not run in the same straight lines that our organizations do. It is in the gaps, in the transitions and in the unclear distribution of responsibilities that the problems become visible.
Several described how adults tend to ask for the information they themselves need, not what the child wants to tell them. This is not an expression of a lack of commitment but of how the structures are shaped. A social worker must document certain information. The school needs others. The health care system something else. The police something fourth. Together, this creates a fragmented narrative in which the child's own voice risks being marginalized. For the child, this often means that they are not allowed to describe their situation based on their own priorities and that their experience of participation quickly disappears.
The conversations also made it clear how much responsibility in practice falls on individual professionals. Regardless of whether it is a teacher, case manager, family home secretary or therapist, they are expected to “solve” situations that are actually the result of larger system deficiencies. It is unreasonable to believe that an individual adult should be able to compensate for a lack of coordination, unclear mandates or lack of common models. When many actors bear parts of the responsibility, the whole becomes crucial and that is what is often missing.
At the same time, there is something hopeful in the fact that so many actors see the same thing. Researchers, authorities, children's rights organizations and municipalities described similar obstacles, but also the same desire to change. This indicates that the solution is not about more specialized interventions, but about creating structures where the child's story can follow through the entire process. Where information does not need to be repeated. Where adults have the conditions to cooperate. Where we do not build systems for the activities, but for the children they are for.
My reflection after Sätra Bruk is that we need to change how we think about responsibility. We need to move from parallel systems to coherent working methods. From each actor “doing their part” to us jointly building the conditions for the child’s wholeness. It doesn’t require more commitment, it already exists. It requires functioning structures. And perhaps that was the most important lesson: when we stop describing the problems individually and instead try to understand them together, the direction forward becomes much clearer.
/ Nicolina