Abstract
France’s welfare system relies on an intricate network of universal-access public services that is fairly effective in terms of ensuring public health and basic needs. Child protection and welfare services, Aide sociale à l’enfance (ASE), operate within this strong framework on a territorial basis, with priorities and protocols being decided in each of France’s 101 départements. To carry out its mission, ASE organises the centralisation of all information giving rise to concern in close collaboration with the justice system, and carries out virtually all targeted welfare and care interventions, whether consensually decided or judicially mandated. Catering to 290, 000 minors and 21, 500 18-to-21 year-olds (as of December 31st, 2014), the French child protection system covers a wide variety of situations and practices that are difficult to compare and make sense of at national level due to the important socio-economic variations and organizational discrepancies from one territory to the next. Two overarching trends can nonetheless be identified in terms of practices, with mixed results: maintaining families together as much as possible, and promoting consensual interventions as opposed to judicial care orders.
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Notes
- 1.
Départements are a territorial unit created in 1789. They number 101 as of January 1, 2017. Since the first wave of the décentralisation (devolution) movement started in 1982, départements have become the main level in charge of organizing social services. This status has been explicitely confirmed for child protection by Law 2007–293 in which the president of the département council is described as having leadership over child protection policies at local level (“chef de file de la protection de l’enfance”).
- 2.
For an in-depth presentation of the French healthcare system and its limitations, please see Nay et al. (2016).
- 3.
The history of child protection in France is fairly ancient, and initiatives to protect orphans and abandoned children have been in existence since the middle ages. Legal texts organizing public interventions to help children in need had already been instituted, most notably in 1811. But we will focus here purely on the modern child protection system: ONPE’s website has a chronology of the main historical texts that can be consulted – Observatoire national de l’enfance en danger/ Observatoire national de la protection de l’enfance (ONPE), n.d.
- 4.
For clarity’s sake, the acronyms used here are the current denominations of the services.
- 5.
Protection judiciaire de la jeunesse (PJJ), a specialized branch of the justice system, can also be tasked with carrying out a child protection intervention, but this is excessively rare. As of December 31st, 2013, PJJ interventions only represent 0.1% of all child protection interventions (see ONPE, 2016d, p. 121.)
- 6.
For more information on the 2007 reform, please see ONPE, n.d.
- 7.
For more information on the 2016 reform, please see ONPE. Protection de l’enfant: les nouvelles dispositions issues de la loi n°2016-297 du 14 mars 2016 relative à la protection de l’enfant. Note d’actualité. Retrieved from https://www.onpe.gouv.fr/system/files/publication/20160315_notedactu_loipe.pdf
- 8.
This helpline is managed by SNATED, service national d’assistance téléphonique à l’enfance en danger, which like ONPE is a branch of GIPED, the public interest grouping for children in danger.
- 9.
Even when the judiciary initiates a procedure on the basis of information it has received directly, a copy of the information should be sent to the département services.
- 10.
Mercifully, there is no acronym for these documents. Many départements make their schémas public on their website.
- 11.
Consent is the legal requirement for administrative intervention. In the framework of judicial interventions, social workers are required to obtain some form of “willingness” or “eagerness” (adhésion) of families toward the proposed intervention.
- 12.
According to Eurostat, under-18 s represent slightly under 20% of asylum requests in France in 2016, of which more than 90% are unaccompanied. But this is not a good indicator, as very few minors ask for asylum in France – in 2014, there were 4000 UAMs in care according to the ministry of justice, but OFPRA, the French asylum body, only received 273 requests from children – (ONPE 2017a, p. 63)
- 13.
A detailed description of the practical difficulties and promising practices for that public can be found in ONPE (2016b).
- 14.
The lack of data on children victims of trafficking, for instance, makes it difficult to raise awareness on this issue and to articulate informed policies.
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Bolter, F., Séraphin, G. (2019). Child Protection in France. In: Merkel-Holguin, L., Fluke, J.D., Krugman, R.D. (eds) National Systems of Child Protection. Child Maltreatment, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93348-1_5
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