Project description
Child protection services in France are facing increasing pressure, marked by rising numbers of children placed in care, growing practitioner workloads, and persistent difficulties in involving birth families in decision-making processes. Placement instability remains a structural concern, as decisions are frequently short-term and renewed until a child reaches adulthood. Despite these challenges, the French system has developed innovative responses, including short-term residential placements for families, home-based foster care, and voluntary long-term fostering. Nevertheless, children’s and parents’ rights to meaningful participation continue to be limited, particularly due to intersecting social inequalities shaped by gender, ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic status.
This doctoral project is part of the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions network Cocoso (Co-Construction in Social Welfare), which foregrounds participation and co-construction as drivers of democratic innovation in social welfare. The project focuses on peer advocacy in child protection in France, understood as support provided by individuals with lived experience of the child protection system to enable others to influence decisions affecting their lives. By recognising lived experience as expertise, peer advocacy seeks to challenge existing power imbalances in policy and practice.
The central research question asks: How do children and adolescents, parents, and practitioners experience peer advocacy within French child protection services? Using a participatory research design, the study will be conducted in collaboration with children, parents, and professionals across various child protection settings within the Fondation de l’Armée du Salut. Methods intending to involve participants as active co-researchers in decision making throughout the research project will be employed. The project will explore the legal and institutional contexts of peer advocacy, examine how intersectional social inequities shape participation, and assess the influence of peer advocacy on decision-making at individual, organisational, and policy levels.
Expected outcomes include the identification of existing peer advocacy practices, the co-construction of strategies for their sustainable implementation, policy recommendations, and the collaborative production of a video addressing intersectionality and participation in French child protection.