Making the Family Relationships of the Unaccompanied Youth Visible: An Opportunity to Include a New Actor in Children Care

ABSTRACT

The objective of this article is to identify those situations where the families of fostered unaccompanied migrant children are made visible in order to favor the incorporation of these families into the pathway planning. The study design is qualitative exploratory. The fieldwork was carried out in Spain and involved working groups with specialized professionals. The results show that the authorities responsible for the foster care completely ignore the families although these are present in the daily life of the unaccompanied children. The few professionals and resources that include the families in the intervention agree that, doing so, the fostering process becomes much easier and smoother. The research concludes that a social work based on a decolonized and transnational perspective is essential to implement educational strategies and gain access to a legal status that favor a positive incorporation of the families into the intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• Unaccompanied children
• Family
• Social Work
• Migration
• Child Welfare

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to professionals who participated in the research, for their support, discussions and proposals.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the University of Zaragoza and in accordance with the confidentiality requirements of the research contract with the Aragonese Social Services Institute.

Consent To Participate

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Consent For Publication

All subjects signed to give informed consent regarding publishing their data in the form of opinions in anonymised transcripts.

Notes

1. Article 189 of the Royal Decree on Regulation of the Organic Law 4/2000 of 11 January on the rights and freedoms of foreigners in Spain and their social integration, after the amendments made by Organic Law 2/2009.

2. For our data gathering, we organized five working groups that analyzed residential care, legal status, age determination, emancipation, and family participation. In this article we analyze the experts meeting dealing with family participation.

3. All quotations reproduce the practitioners’ words as written (in the survey) by them and have not been corrected or changed in any way. The English translation has been reviewed by the team editor at the University of Zaragoza. Quotations include the identification of the interviewee (profile).

4. During the fieldwork in France for a preliminary investigation (Gimeno & Gutiérrez, 2019), the decoration of squats and precarious houses with photographs and drawings of the family, especially of the mothers, was verified.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Aragonese Institute of Social Services [2019/0338].