Summary: | There is a principal consent both in the convention on the rights of the child, the Swedish social service act and in “Barns behov i centrum” (BBiC, similar to the British “Looking after children”, LAC) that children should participate and have an impact on matters that affect them in relation to their age and maturity. This thesis focus on how children’s voices are recorded in social welfare files and how their participation in the investigation is constructed. I have read the interviews and the social reports of ten children, conducted by social workers in a municipality in the outskirts of Stockholm. The children’s voices in the files are a secondary voice, they are the social worker’s interpretation of the interviews with the children. I have used thematic analysis in order to answer my research questions. The result shows that all children had been able to talk to the social worker and nearly all of them were informed about why there was an investigation. The children’s stories were valued as true by the social workers and they were referred as information givers. Most of them were only interviewed orally, without support from child adaptive methods. They had very limited impact on how the investigation were conducted, how their information would be used and on the choice of intervention.
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