Experiences of children’s formal and lived participation in family law proceedings

Abstract

This phenomenological study explores the social meaning of children’s participation in the world of the child in the life situation of family law proceedings. The findings, based on a qualitative analysis of interviews with children and young people, suggest that the meaning of formal participation is not necessarily experienced as inherent in the world of the child. Instead, incorporating the concepts of lived participation may provide a more comprehensive understanding of children’s participations, which is characterized by an inevitable relational complexity and an overextended sense of responsibility in experiences of familial conflicts and exposure of harm.

Introduction

It is widely acknowledged that the right of children to participate is a crucial and prioritized right, particularly within the context of activities where social workers engage with children during family law proceedings. In such proceedings, the phenomenon of children’s participation requires actions to be taken by multiple professional actors, including judges, legal clerks, and social workers. These actions are mainly aimed at fulfilling what will be referred to here as formal participation, which involves not only inviting children to participate but also gathering information from children. Formal participation is connected to certain prerequisites within the adult world, such as the child having reached a certain age or degree of maturity, as a direct measure of children’s expression being relevant and trustworthy (Wågby Gräfe, 2022, 2023). Accordingly, the prerequisites for children’s formal participation influence both social work and legal practice.

The establishment of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) not only manifests the importance of children’s rights but also differentiates them from to human rights (Wall, 2010). As the UNCRC refers to an assessment of age and maturity as relevant for granting children the right to participate, the rights of older and more mature children are consequently separated from those of younger ones. This is not the least evident in Sweden, where a legislative council referral states, “Taking into account the child’s age and maturity implies, as it has until now, that generally greater consideration should be given to the views of older children compared to those of younger children.” (Lagrådet, 2021: 130, my translation). This aligns with the point made by Archard and Uniacke (2021: 523), who state that children’s capacity to form and express views is age-dependent and that “simple expressions of feelings or behaviorally revealed preferences do not constitute views.” Further, even if children’s conventional rights are stated as every child’s rights, they do not come with guarantees. In other words, not all children are holders of the protection, participation, and provision that the convention set out for them. However, recently, Sweden has displayed a more child-focused discourse in the wake of the UNCRC becoming Swedish law (Leviner, 2018). Nevertheless, as Leviner (2018) points out, “child friendly intentions” should not be confused with actual, social inclusion in participatory processes. This warrants a closer look at how the intentions and experiences of children’s participation intersect within the Swedish context.

Presuppositions guiding the knowledge concerning how to motivate and understand children’s participation are distributed by means of conventions and national laws to professionals working within the situation of family law proceedings, such as social workers, who in Sweden are responsible for the assessment that will be used in court to settle questions of custody, residence, and access to parents. However, the ambiguities surrounding children’s rights, identified by Lee (1999) over 20 years ago, are seldom made visible in this distribution process. Criticism has arisen regarding this issue and remains a topic of discussion for many researchers and state investigators, as well as for practitioners within social work. The criticism is mostly aimed at the formal rights, part of which includes children’s formal participation. For example, Twum-Danso Imoh and Okyere (2020) point out that children’s participation is at risk of being more of a process that ensures control remains with the adults. Such criticism is similar to Leviner’s (2018) view on participation as a mere indicator of bigger structural problems within the social context, which aligns with Beck’s (1997) critique of the articulation of rights as a rhetorical myth of freedom that serves to conceal the inherent constraints of those very rights. Further, insufficient implementations of children’s rights have often been attributed to the consideration of the child as vulnerable and in need of protection. Therefore, many social researchers have suggested that it should be replaced with a view of children as “knowable social actors” (Van Bijleveld et al., 2015: 137). However, Archard and Uniacke (2021) argue that the notion of children having a say in all matters concerning them is deceptively simplistic. Other researchers have further discussed this issue when addressing the complexities and challenges of the child’s voice, given that children are not seen as social actors like adults (Eldén, 2013; Komulainen, 2007; Lee 1999; Spyrou, 2011; Sundhall, 2012 to mention a few). Criticisms have also been raised in situations where children’s vulnerability is overshadowed by an emphasis on children’s competence and ability to act on their own behalf (Lind, 2019; Ponnert, 2007), where agency is seen as innately positive (Sutterlüty and Tisdall, 2019), and where children face injustice within the welfare system (Knezevic, 2017; Neale, 2002). If children were acknowledged as participants on equal terms with adults, without having to be as adults, the UNCRC would not need to include certain participatory rights for children (see also Wall, 2010).

Children’s situation within family law proceedings has been investigated in international research. For example, studies have explored children’s feelings of being caught between parents in loyalty conflicts (Augustijn, 2022) and substantiated allegations and social problems within family law cases (Bergman and Rejmer, 2017; Johnston et al., 2005). The negative outcomes of parental conflicts on children are acknowledged in research, but protocols for handling such issues are often missing within social work practice (Saini et al., 2019). Many studies, both international and Swedish, have stressed the implementation of children’s formal participation in family law assessments and in social work that connects to family law issues (see, e.g., Amato and Afifi, 2006; Dahlstrand, 2004; Eriksson, 2012; Grape et al., 2024; Neale, 2002; Sundhall, 2012; Verrocchio and Baker, 2015). In addition, Swedish state-initiated statistical studies have investigated whether, and in what way, children participate in family law proceedings. In particular, they have examined whether children’s views have been considered or given influence on decisions regarding custody, residence, and access to parents (SOU 2017: 6; Swedish Gender Equality Agency, 2022). These studies show how children in family law proceedings in Sweden, especially younger children or children who are regarded as being influenced by a parent, face obstacles in having influence when participating. Such obstacles have been connected to Swedish policy, which highlights the need to assess maturity, thereby oversimplifying and narrowing the possibility of participation (Wågby Gräfe, 2022).

Participation has also been discussed within conversational analysis, for example, in studies investigating how professionals within social work regard participation (Iversen, 2013). Some studies have offered tools for recognizing children’s involvement, suggesting that their involvement is always there for the adult world to explore and adjust rather than invent (Edman et al., 2022). Such a stance has been seen earlier in the work of Speier (1970) and Mackay (1974), who argue for the need to look at children’s existent everyday activities in order to gain knowledge about their interactional competences. Similarly, Eriksson and Näsman (2009) emphasize that the purpose of participation for children may precede the family law proceedings and rather be about life situations as well as about their close relationships.

Turning away from the dogma of “formal participation” in a “formal situation” (i.e., family law proceedings) allows researchers to approach the meaning of participation as a phenomenon contextualized within a life situation and situated within the world of the child. This world—with its own particular “province of meaning” as the sociological phenomenologist Alfred Schütz (1962) calls it—is one of the subworld involved in the situation (which will be elaborated on later). The provinces of meaning refers to the boundaries within which individuals make sense of their experiences and interactions in the world (Schütz, 1962). Participation can then be explored directly within the world of the child, that is, in the sense of lived participation in a life situation as opposed to formal participation in a formal situation. This connects to research by Hanson and Nieuwenhuys (2013) as well as Karlsson (2021), who use the term “lived rights” in a similar manner to refer to aspects that are not covered within formal rights. Further, Twum-Danso Imoh (2023) stresses the importance of going beyond the concept of formal participation to genuinely transform children’s possibilities into participation. With this backdrop, I intend to use the term lived participation to get a fuller sense of the social meaning of children’s participation. Moreover, Karlsson (2019) stresses the importance of taking children (their voice and agency) seriously in order to fulfil their rights as they are lived and experienced by the children themselves. Similarly, in this study, I consider rights as more than just a formality as understood in the adult world; instead, I view them within the context of the world of the child and explore the meaning of participation within that frame. Namely, I will focus on the difference that attuning to the province of meaning of the world of the child could make on the meaning of participation in family law proceedings (cf. Wågby Gräfe and Englander, 2022). Specifically, the situation is traditionally understood as a form of social intervention within family law proceedings, where children’s participation in family law proceedings in Sweden is managed as a formal process by social workers. This study’s exploration of the social meaning of children’s participation underscores that a narrow focus on formal processes may not fully capture experiences within the world of the child. By recognizing this limitation, we can gain valuable insights that inform social work practices, emphasizing the importance of integrating children’s lived experiences into professional frameworks.

The aim of the study

The overall research question guiding this study is as follows: How does the social meaning of children’s participation appear in the world of the child in the life situation of family law proceedings? The study focuses on when the child is thrown into the conflicts between the parents—not only family relationships and social problems during the proceedings but also family life in general.

Method

To seek the social meaning of a phenomenon within lived experience in an everyday social context, this study applied a phenomenological approach to a qualitative social science research design. Specifically, the study design followed the phenomenological approach to social science outlined by Schütz (1962, 1967; see also Barber, 2021; Natanson, 1973). In addition, it followed some recent methodological strategies from qualitative phenomenological research (Churchill, 2022; Englander, 2020; Englander and Morley, 2023).

As the social meaning of the phenomenon children’s participation was sought, categories such as phenomenon, world, and situation shaped the qualitative research design in line with Schütz (1962, 1967) and Churchill (2022). The phenomenon is regarded as context dependent within the “relevance structure” (Schütz, 1962) of the world of the child during the situation of family law procedures. “World” is an eidetic category that permeates everyday life, where a person encounters multiple worlds, such as the academic world, the world of dreams, the world of old age, and so on. “Situation” is here meant in the sense that a person is always in a life situation, indicating that any situation, even a formal one, such as family law proceedings, is also a life situation (Churchill, 2022). Accordingly, both “world” and “situation” provide a social context for a phenomenon to appear—a “phenomenon” being the meaning of something—as a phenomenon is always understood from its intersubjective constitution (Englander, 2019; Wågby Gräfe, 2023).

The material for this study was generated through interviews with children and youg people who have experienced family law proceedings, aiming to explore the experiences in the world of the child within the context of these proceedings.

Selecting informants

Although the qualitative exploration of the interviews was geared towards the social meaning of the phenomenon as context dependent within the life situation and world, the selection criteria were formally explicated to situate the phenomenon within an empirical context. The selection of the research informants followed what is generally known in qualitative research as “purposive sampling,” that is, selecting informants who have experienced a particular, namely the world of a child, and have been through a particular life situation, in this case, family law proceedings. Based on information from court orders retrieved from three different district courts in Sweden, letters were sent out to children and their custodians and to young people (over 18 years of age) who were considered children at the time of the formal situation of the family law process. The interviews were conducted four years after the formal process of the family law proceedings, so some of the informants were past the legal age of minority. The purpose of conducting interviews 4 years after the formal proceedings was to gain a deeper understanding of the long-term experiences, while also allowing for a reflexive distance. In all the selected court judgements, an assessment regarding custody, residence, or contact had been ordered but not necessarily performed.

Ten informants aged between 15 and 21 years from seven different families were interviewed; nine of them were females and one was male. They all had siblings, and all but one were still living at home with one of the parents. ¹ Only some of them still had contact with both parents. All informants had experiences of long-term, unresolved conflicts between their parents. Even when the conflicts had persisted for a long time and the informants had experienced being abused, neglected, or mistreated in some way, some of them had not been considered for child welfare assessments or interventions either before, in conjunction with, or after the family law proceedings.

The interview process

All informants except one were interviewed twice, which gave 19 interviews in total. Due to pandemic restrictions, six of the informants wanted to be interviewed by phone (and one also chose to have the follow-up interview by phone). After each interview, the informants were asked about the interview experience and whether they had any questions or something to add. The interviews followed the approach of phenomenological interviewing in qualitative research (Englander, 2020). During the interviews, a few initial open questions were asked, targeting how the informants had experienced their living arrangements and their interpersonal relationships with their family members. Some questions were also asked about how the informants experienced their involvement in the formal process, if they had been involved. The interview questions were open-ended (with some exceptions), focusing on exploring the social world of the child within the formal situation of family law proceedings. As will show in the excerpts I also used a lot of supporting comments as “yes”. Following standard qualitative interview procedures, the interviews were recorded in Swedish and transcribed verbatim. The excerpts used in this article are translated to English by me.

Ethical considerations

After receiving informative letters about the study, the informants contacted the researcher either on their own or through their custodians and gave their informed consent to participate in the study. The informants were informed of their right to end their participation at any time without having to state any reasons, and their consent was sought continuously during the interview process. In addition, details regarding the informants have been changed to conceal their true identities. The complexities of dealing with vulnerability due to the sensitive subject matter, on the one hand, and the importance of including children in the study, on the other hand, were considered throughout the research process. ² The project was approved by the local ethical board (number and city are declared in the title page).

The analysis process

A whole-part-whole data analysis was carried out to discover the qualitative constitution of the phenomenon under study and to phenomenologically reflect on whether or how the social meaning of the phenomenon was context dependent (Churchill, 2022; Englander and Morley, 2023, cf. Sadowski and McIntosh, 2015). The following steps were taken: (1) attending to the whole, in which the researcher listened to and read the interview material several times, with time elapsing between the readings; (2) reflecting phenomenologically on how the social relationships transpired within the phenomenon and how the phenomenon is contextually dependent within the d of the child in the studied life situation; and (3) reflectively varying the meanings to transcend the individual meanings of the informants’ personal worlds and discover the general meaning of the phenomenon in its dependency on situation and world. This means not taking individual experiences as evidence, but rather expanding and exploring the potential meaning of these experiences on a more general level. The guiding scientific approach throughout the analysis was remaining within the relevance structure of the social sciences while engaging in a back-and-forth working process of the figure-ground relationship between the empirical material and the eidetic phenomenological categories of phenomenon, situation, and world. That is, following the question of how the phenomenon take its form within the subworld in this specific situation.

Findings

The analysis of the experiences expressed by the informants of the study—as understood within the world of the child in the Swedish setting of family law proceedings—revealed two interdependent constituents: inevitable relational complexity and overextended sense of responsibility. Each section begins with a brief synthesis of the findings, outlining the general structure of the meaning of participation in the Swedish family law proceedings as expressed by the study’s informants, before moving on to elaborate and unpack each constituent, that is, the parts of the whole. Excerpts from the interview material exemplify the constituents and their variations, illustrating the manifold content, which is common in phenomenological research (cf. Sadowski and McIntosh, 2016).

Inevitable relational complexity

The general structure that connects to the first constituent shows that the lived experience of participation precedes the formal experience of family law proceedings; it is an existential situation grounded in actions and decisions made by the parents that affect the children’s living conditions. The consistent relational bonds have great bearing on the child’s experiences while growing up and constitute complexities within the world of the child.

For instance, the relationship between the child and family members is influenced by conflicts between the parents as well as other social problems, creating a situation that has been difficult for them to handle as children. According to the informants, they had to navigate the complexity of the experience of parents disputing on their own, as they did not feel listened to by either parents or professionals, even though they felt that the formal decisions belonged solely to the adult world. The informants involved in the formal proceedings perceived it as less within their control than their everyday lives, despite being thrown into both the formal and lived situation. Still, the informants took measures they felt necessary within their lived participation, even if not listened to in the formal context. Thus, their lived experiences were both separate from and managed in relation to the formal situation. Nonetheless, they were attentive to the relational meaning of their parents’ actions and participation, whether within the formal situation or not. This aspect highlights the inherent inevitability of relational complexity, which pertains to the dynamics within the adult world and is shaped by the child’s perceptions of their parents’ ongoing interactions and actions. This, in turn, shapes the child’s understanding of themselves, their situation, and their subsequent actions.

Exemplifying inevitable relational complexity

The findings indicate that children’s participation within the world of the child is mostly influenced by the child–parent relational bonds that connects to influence and dependence (but not solely as school and peers are also important) and by the actions that take place within the lived participation in the situation. For instance, Nicole, who was 15 years old when interviewed, had for many years not felt that anybody had listened to her. Even when the formal decision after some time took the direction she wanted and allowed her to live with her mother, she still perceived the decision made by the adults as being based on other aspects rather than her views. In other words, she regarded her own experiences of the relational complexities and views prior to the formal decision as still unacknowledged by the adult world.

Another example of how relational complexity is present is demonstrated by Lukas, soon to be 18 years old (at the time of the interview). After his parents’ divorce, he had dual residence for a few years, which Lukas said was decided by his parents. Later, Lukas’s contact with his father became less frequent, due to both his father’s disinclination to see him and the violence his father had exposed him to. His mother later filed for sole custody because of that violence. At first glance, Lukas could be seen as non-participating, not just in the formal process but also in the lived experience of the process.

Lukas: I don’t have such a great relationship with him [his father] at all, you know.

Interviewer: No.

L: So that’s kind of why I’ve not been so involved or, well, haven’t cared so much about the sole custody thing. […]

L: I mean, it is, was a bit difficult, so to speak, a bit of a bummer.

I: Mm.

L: That it should turn out like that, but…

I: Mm.

L: But yes, when you know the reason for that, you have to sort of agree with it.

However, Lukas’s passive stance is connected to relational circumstances that did not push him to act or feel differently. He has been protected from his father’s abuse not just by the formal decision in court but also by his father’s own estrangement. Consequently, he did not have to pursue his own views, as they are not in conflict with either of his parents’ views. Nevertheless, as Lukas’s father’s absence is not grounded in the meaning of taking responsibility for the violence but is based on an indifference for his children, Lukas still reported feeling ambivalent towards his father. He expressed that he wished to feel wanted by his father while simultaneously feeling sad and angry because of what his father had done to him, regarding both the violence and the estrangement. Lukas said that he had his “own reasons” for not wanting to see his father. However, his own reasons did not differ from what he felt was the aim of the court order; rather, it differed from his father’s reasons for not wanting to see him.

Both Nicole’s and Lukas’s experiences of lived participation were evident in the interviews, in that their provinces of meaning were guided by relational issues. For instance, even if the factual content of the formal decision aligned with Nicole’s own wish, her wish and the social meaning of the decision were worlds apart, which she perceived as surreal (she referred to it as “living in a joke”). For Lukas, the meaning of the formal decision aligned with his own. Lukas was still attuned to what his father might think about him and their relationship despite the fact that his father had mistreated him. However, as Lukas’s father made no effort to see him, Lukas did not have to deal with contradictory viewpoints; consequently, he did not have to be clear or vocal about his own views. That did not mean that Lukas did not care about his father’s estrangement or that he did not experience the relational situation as complex, but since he was not burdened by the formal situation he did not have to take measures. Nicole’s and Lukas’s situation and experiences exemplify the variations in relational complexities and the inevitability of relational attunement within the world of the child.

As the findings demonstrate, children’s participation is influenced by relational complexities, and difficulties within the family seem to complicate the possibilities for formal participation. Lived participation within the world of the child transcends formal participation because it is part of the child’s everyday life. Even if the formal situation is experienced as an everyday matter—that is, a part of what one has grown up with and has become accustomed to—it will never precede the social meaning constituted by relational complexity.

Another example of how the lived participation precedes the formal one and how it is constituted by relational complexity was provided by Jennifer, who was 15 years old at the time of the interview. She wanted to stop visiting her mother at an early age because of experiences of abuse. During the interview, she referred to being presented with an age minimum of 12 years (that has become a praxis but is not stated in the Swedish law), after which she would be formally allowed to decide which parent to live with. However, she realized that age was not the only condition that needed to be fulfilled in order to get her wish across in the formal situation:

Jennifer: It’s absolutely not the case that it’s enough to be 12 and then you can say who you want to live with, so that, well, it was a longing I had.

I: Yes.

J: Absolutely, but it required very, very, very much for them [the assessors] to realize that I really did not want to live with her [the mother]. If I had just said ‘no, I don’t want to’ [to the assessors], then I would still have to meet her.

In other words, Jennifer realized that the relational complexity of her life circumstances directly affected and was a prerequisite for the formal participation. Although formal participation should be easier to access when a child is older, the lived experienced is much more complex in the world of the child. Repeatedly expressing one’s view is not enough in the formal situation; instead, several simultaneous actions need to be fulfilled to make an impact on the formal decisions. Due to the relational complexity of her situation, Jennifer had to take several actions, not just repeatedly and forcefully expressing her own view regarding her mother’s behavior towards her, which the professionals finally regarded harmful for her well-being. Later in the interview, Jennifer also compared her experience of participation with that of her brother. She stated that her brother was still partly living with their mother despite telling the professionals that he did not want to live with her. Jennifer, who regarded her father as more supportive than her brother’s father, largely attributed the fact that the decision was in her favor to his support. Therefore, she believed that the abuse that her mother had inflicted on her, which she had reported to the decision makers, was viewed as an insufficient reason for allowing her to live with her father. Jennifer was also aware that her father’s support had to not come across as manipulative or as part of an elaborate plan to exclude her mother. These insights into the relational complexities are further connected to the next constituent, which will now be discussed.

Overextended sense of responsibility

The general structure is thus characterized by complexity—seen as an inevitable relational matter—and as this section will show, by the children’s experience of responsibility, regardless of whether they experienced having an influence on the decisions or not. Decisions on custody, residence, and care made during their childhood were experienced as relational decisions that were mainly affected by the formal assessments of their parents’ actions. These were decisions in which the children’s views were experienced as either secondary or not considered, regardless if it aligned with the formal decision or not. As children, some of the informants had sometimes taken action to improve their situations, whereas others had just followed what had been decided. The choice to act or follow depended on how they had experienced and assessed their own situation in relation to risks and safety. For the informants who had been involved in the formal process, the troubled social situation and the difficulties they as children had been exposed to had in different ways complicated their possibilities to formally participate. This had to do with both how they related to their parents’ actions and how they as children had assessed their situation in terms of risks and safety precautions.

Acknowledging the continuous effect of the conflicts on the lives of the informants and the relationships within the family, particularly when those conflicts and other social problems intersect, reveals how responsibility is distributed within the family and how an overextended sense of responsibility emerges in the interview material.

Exemplifying overextended sense of responsibility

As described in the previous section, relational complexity became the inevitable social context within which the informants found themselves, and a sense of responsibility that transcends the relevance structure of the child also became apparent within their life situation. When describing the roles and obligations assigned to them within the context of their relationship with their parents and family, they talked about how, as children, they felt responsible for resolving conflicts or maintaining harmony, which is disproportionate to their role as children. Accordingly, the relational complexity in the world of the child both precedes and is intertwined with the idea of formal participation. During the interview, Jennifer who were also mentioned above, said that after telling professionals about her situation, she was even more mistreated by her mother because the professionals forwarded what she had said. In other words, the professionals did not acknowledge the lived participation within Jennifer’s situation, behaving as if what Jennifer did or said had no impact on the situation. This experience made it difficult for Jennifer to trust social workers with her situation. She even stopped telling her father about her problems when she realized that he also forwarded the information Jennifer had given him about her mother’s behavior. Despite being listened to in the sense of being heard, she experienced that she was not listened to in the sense of being understood in terms of the relational complexity that she could not escape. For Jennifer, the actions taken by the adults resulted in her silence. Consequently, her progress in age and maturity did not provide her with increased formal participation and influence. Rather, her formal participation, in terms of being heard by professionals, diminished her possibilities when the actions within the adult world did not align accordingly. She felt she had to protect herself from harm by stopping to confide in others, as no one else acknowledged the relational complexities. At the same time, her sense of lived participation increased in the form of working actively from within the relational complexity that she found herself in; taking responsibility for protecting herself from harm. For example, she stopped calling her mother, even though it had been agreed upon in the formal setting that she should. This shows how the constituent of relational complexities intersect with the overextended sense of responsibility.

However, the experiences of participation also involved a form of distribution of responsibility from the adult world to the informants as children. For instance, Nomi, who was 17 years old at the time of the interview, described a common situation in which she had to take care of her sibling.

Nomi: So, during the nights there was a lot of shouting and fighting.

I: Mm.

N: And I was used to it, but my little sister was only two years old.

I: Yes.

N: Or something like that, so she got scared and didn’t know what was happening. She just heard a lot of screaming.

I: Yes.

N: So, she got sad, and mom and dad were busy arguing.

I: Mm.

N: So, no one came in there and comforted her, so she came down to me in the bunk bed. […] Well, I got scared, too.

I: Yes.

N: I was still just a child, and even though I was used to it and sort of knew that they, that they often argued and shouted…

I: Yes.

N: So, I was frightened. I didn’t know. When I was, that is, when I was in my and my little sister’s room.

I: Mm.

N: With the door closed, so I didn’t know what was happening out there.

I: No.

N: And I knew from before that dad had attacked my mom.

I: Yes, exactly.

N: Several times, so I was also frightened, but then, I didn’t dare go out.

Although Nomi had been afraid and frequently experienced her parents’ arguments and her father’s violence against her mother, she took measures to ensure her sister’s well-being; however, her caretaking of her sister was never acknowledged by either of her parents or anyone in the family. Furthermore, the responsibility of providing comfort to a frightened child was not undertaken by the parents but left for Nomi, also frightened, to fulfil.

The overextended sense of responsibility is also exemplified by Sam, aged 17 years, who had to move between her mother’s, her father’s, and her grandparents’ house to escape from what she believed was bad for her. She had been doing so since she was 13 years old based on her own assessment of what was best for her in relation to her parents’ situation. Sam thoughtfully used the expression “run away,” instead of the verb “move,” to describe her behavior. At one point in the interview, she stated, “I have decided to live there, but I have never decided what my life should be like once I do, because wherever I am, my life is not like I want it to be.” Running away can then be understood as taking responsibility for one’s situation and getting away from a bad situation. However, it also implies an overextended responsibility for one’s own sense of self, which is grounded within the context of the relational complexity that one cannot escape.

Although the above only represents some of the manifold examples in the interview material, the gist of the experiences reported here speaks of the relations between the world of the child and the world of the adult. However, these relations are between a child whose parent has not acted in the best interest of the child. Therefore, they require a reinterpretation of how the world of the adult and that of the child relate to the assumed sense of responsibility and the overall social context as the informants within the world of the child have had to act in a more mature and responsible way than they would have liked. At the same time, the responsibilities were experienced as predetermined or imposed rather than assumed. Nomi, for instance, talked about how she had to be mature from the beginning. Thus, the responsibility is not about having adult competences that one is socialized into within the world of the adult but rather about taking measures within the world of the child that are constituted within the relational complexity of the life situation that the child is existentially “thrown into.”

Conclusion

This study focuses on the social meaning of children’s participation in family law proceedings, explored within the world of the child. This requires setting aside the adult-centric view of formal participation, which is usually tied to an assessment of age and maturity. The complexities of participation relate not only to maltreatment and social problems or the quality of parental relationships but also to the child’s sense of responsibility. The issue is not whether the child is participating but how they are already participating. Namely, the study emphasizes lived participation to acknowledge children’s experiences in conflict-ridden family situations, addressing their life situations beyond the formal context of family law proceedings. The findings support earlier studies indicating that other aspects of participation, such as descriptions of their everyday experiences, are crucial for understanding the child’s world, since not all expressions made by children qualify as views in the adult world (cf. Archard and Uniacke, 2021), Participation as a lived experience in this certain situation is constituted by inevitable relational complexities, pinpointing it as prior to experiences of formal participation. That is, in the world of the child, there seems to be a constant attunement to relational complexities. This is important to stress, certainly in difficult situations such as family law proceedings, because it could also tell us something about the immediate vulnerability and risks that coincide with relationality-driven participation. As Twum-Danso Imoh (2023) highlights, children’s participation is often assumed to be about adults offering space to children’s voices, making it a matter of adults empowering children. What is more seldom addressed is the need for adults stepping back from power (Gallacher and Gallagher, 2008; Twun-Danso Imoh, 2023). The informants’ experiences of formal participation in connection with assessments foregrounded their rights in the adult world. Although decisions in the adult world are motivated by a concern for the children’s lives, the decisions are mainly seen within the world of the child as the result of a conversation between the parents, sometimes including professionals. Instead, showing a true concern for children would have to begin with relationality and social quality and with the children feeling heard and being shown respect in a difficult situation.

Further, the immediate part-taking of the world, as an intersubjective experience, is fundamental for phenomenology and can inform practice and policy in social work. This calls for an elaboration on the idea of how simply being thrown into something constitutes grounds for participation; that is, there may not be an epistemological difference between living through something and actively engaging in it. As Edman et al. (2022) point out, influence comes with attending to something. In a phenomenological sense, the individual’s being in the world it is both a giving and a taking, and an individual’s history is about “my life in others and the life of others in me” (Merleau-Ponty, cited in Morley, 2000: 180). With regards to children’s everyday experiences, children are acknowledged as already being-in-the-world. That is, the situation of being thrown into something, both in the formal and lived sense, reveals the relational bonds to the world, which also implies the need for a more neutral stance of children as actors.

By acknowledging the lived experiences and the social contextualization of the phenomenon of participation, new questions surface concerning, for example, the relational possibilities for participating in a safe and sound environment, as well as the broader ethical question of how the results of this study would relate to the human and civil rights of children being “thrown into” similar social situations. As we have seen, children participate even in the most difficult situations, and they assume or are even given responsibility by parents in these situations, not to forget that the responsibility in this context is described as overextended. Within the world of the child, the actions of children seem to take place in the most vulnerable situations, regardless of whether these actions are active or passive. Children’s own experiences of taking actions (or not) and of being vulnerable (or not) within the situations are intertwined and inseparable. Moreover, their actions should not be oversimplified: Rather, children’s actions should be understood as relationally attuned and reciprocal, as well as interpersonally corresponding to vulnerabilities and risk assessments.

Finally, I would like to stress the implications of the study for the field of social work. These implications mostly concern the need for social workers to acknowledge children’s lived participation when balancing between the formal participation and the attunement to the child. Further, any type of objective or measurable alignment between the views of adults and those of the child should not be the main concern. Participation is not merely about having one’s views considered and making a difference (Archard and Uniacke, 2021). Instead, within the world of the child, aspects such as being listened to, feeling understood, and feeling safe are closely linked to family relationships, where the distribution of responsibility is a significant concern. The findings of this study can be further discussed in the context of recognizing children as knowledgeable moral subjects (Knezevic, 2017). Children’s roles as knowledge subjects may be perceived differently when considering their lived experiences of participation. Importantly, many children are never included in formal processes, suggesting that social work practice, particularly in Sweden, could do much more to reach out to those living in conflict-ridden situations.