Looked after children's right to contact with birth parents
An Australian study
Bibliographic Data
In Australia, there are more than 46 000 children in out‐of‐home care (OOHC). Most of these children have been in OOHC for more than 2 years. Similarly, there are more than 407 000 children in the United States and over 80 800 in England who are ‘looked after’ with approximately one third of these children being in OOHC for more than 2 years. This paper concerns ‘looked after’ children's rights to contact with their birth parents. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) requires child protection systems to recognize the rights of children to maintain contact with their families except where this is not in the child's ‘best interests’. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study conducted in Australia exploring legal and family support practitioners' perceptions of barriers to contact between children in OOHC and their birth parents. The thematic analysis identified four themes: These were as follows: a focus on systems driven responses; lack of cultural recognition and responsiveness; carers' disconnection from birth parents; and parents' exclusion. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding and recognizing children's right to contact with birth parents
Child protection · Convention on the Rights of the Child · Disconnection · Focus group · Human rights · Political science · Qualitative research · Social science · Sociology · Thematic analysis · Child Abuse and Trauma · Child Welfare and Adoption · Ethics and Legal Issues in Pediatric Healthcare · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology
Qualitative and Mixed Methods in Public Health
KContact, an enhanced intervention for contact between children in out-of-home care and their parents
Interventions to improve supervised contact visits between children in out of home care and their parents
Contact between children in out-of-home placements and their family and friends networks
The UNCRC
Attempting to operationalize a multi-dimensional definition of permanency in child welfare practice
A tangled web
How foster carers experience agency support for birth family contact
Adoption and permanence planning in Scotland
Two families joined by a child
Identity Formation in Children and Young People in Open Adoptions from Out-of-home Care in New South Wales, Australia
Identifying the Patterns of Family Contact for Children in Care
The incredible years parenting program for foster carers and biological parents of children in foster care
Parents’ supervised contact visits with their children in care
Successful Qualitative Research
Child Protection and Vulnerable Families
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,33 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |