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TIINA MERKULJEVA
CHILD PROTECTION IN ESTONIA
The child protection in Estonia is ensured by the local government and
community organizations. The municipalities will drop the primary
responsibility for protecting and assisting children. The role of child protection
workers is to protect and assist the child in need. Child protection is based on the
networking. It means that child protection worker cooperate with other agencies
mainly in two ways — first, responding to others’ by incoming information and
secondly, by addressing the abused child to other specialists for treatment or
evaluation and other assistance.’ The case-based approach requires the ability
to organize the work to protect the client (child), which includes the estab¬
lishment of trust relationships based on direct contact with the child and his
family, client counseling emphasizing strengths, meetings and conversation,
problem solving, implementation the law and monitoring.’ This requires certain
resources available to this worker—the time to collect information and analyze
this information, support, and supervision. The increasing number of children
and families in need means more cases of assessment and decision making for
child protection workers. It is crucial for the child protection worker to have
knowledge of new reforms and approaches in the given field and the process of
assessment should be informed by this information. To achieve this, the child
protection worker must have the knowledge and skills to approach the child
and family and to engage them in a trusting relationship. In this case, child
protection workers require external support for the assessment decisions in
order to strengthen and improve the quality of the assessments—supervision,
colleague, services, and legislation‘. Supervision has a major role to play in
safeguarding social workers (child protection worker) in a process that can
assist them to manage emotions and uncertainty. There are inevitable tensions
at the intersection of the personal and professional, where ‘dangerousness’ may
be a fear and optimism may be muted.°*
Reflective supervision in individual or group format provides an opportunity
to consider case material in detail and depth, including the ways in which the
1K. Soo ~ K. Ilves — J. Strémpl, Networking and notification of cases of child abuse, Final Report,
University of Tartu, Institute for Sociology and Social Policy, 2009, 27.
? E.Korp -R. Rääk, Child protection in local government, Tallinn, Ministry of Social Affairs
and Health Development Institute, 2004, 23-24.
3K. Toros, Assessment of Child Well-being: Child Protection practice in Estonia, Tallinn Uni¬
versity dissertations on social sciences, 2011, 127.
4 Ibid., 26.
5 L. Beddoe, Surveillance or Reflection: Professional Supervision in ‘the Risk Society’, British
Journal of Social Work, Vol. 40, 2010, 1288.
* 178 +