Keywords

Introduction

In recent decades, researchers, policy-makers, governments, and others have undertaken important work to better understand how differences between international jurisdictions in their approaches to investigating and managing child maltreatment might lead to better outcomes for children (Connolly & Katz, 2019). This work was undertaken as a result of growing concerns about outcomes experienced by children and families, alongside a worry that the operation of the child welfare system itself is neither effective nor efficient (Devaney, 2019). For those children who do disclose maltreatment, the journey from initial disclosure through judicial completion can be a long and daunting process to navigate (Alaggia, 2004, 2010).

This chapter presents data from research with service providers and policy-makers in two parts of the United Kingdom—Northern Ireland and Scotland—on the introduction of the Barnahus model. In doing so, the discussions with key stakeholders highlight the tensions that can arise in seeking to promote children’s rights to safety, justice, recovery, and recognition within a legal system that also must uphold the rights of the accused. Our aim in this chapter is to explore how various stakeholder groups involved with children in the aftermath of a disclosure of maltreatment conceive of the role and function of a Barnahus, as well as the opportunities and challenges to the introduction and implementation of the model. In doing so, we recognise that there is no one singular expression of a Barnahus, as opposed to an agreed set of principles about what a Barnahus should represent and encapsulate (PROMISE Barnahus Network, 2017).

Background

Sir John Gillen, in his Report into the Law and Procedures in Serious Sexual Offences in Northern Ireland (2019), highlighted that cases of serious sexual offences committed against children incur the longest delays in the judicial system, with an average duration of 986 days (i.e. more than two and a half years). This delay serves as a barrier to children’s right to justice (Article 3) and recovery from trauma (Article 39), as highlighted in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, or UNCRC (Lavoie et al., 2022).

Although child welfare systems show considerable commonality (Merkel-Holguin et al., 2019), countries have also shaped their systems and service responses in different ways. These differences are driven by societal and cultural norms, legislative requirements, and competing ideologies about the role of the state in situations where children are believed to have experienced maltreatment (Duerr Berrick et al., 2023). At their heart, however, child welfare systems have a core set of objectives (Devaney 2009):

  • Reducing the prevalence and incidence of child maltreatment through preventative approaches;

  • Reducing the child mortality rate as a consequence of having a system in place for identifying and protecting children at risk of significant harm;

  • Preventing children identified as being in need of protection from experiencing repeated harm;

  • Addressing the effects of the harm experienced by children on their development and promoting their welfare, which should result in improvements to psychological and social functioning, and educational attainment;

  • Addressing the needs of other family members so that they will be in a better position to provide for the care and future protection of the child;

  • Promoting the protection of the wider public through identifying and managing those who might present ongoing risks to other children.

As Lanigan (2020) notes, the complexity of responding to child maltreatment lies within its position at the intersection of child welfare and criminal justice. The perspectives and priorities of the parallel investigations potentially overlap in seeking to both promote children’s safety whilst simultaneously holding to account those who have been accused of causing harm. The challenge for professionals is heightened by the vulnerability of child victims to secondary victimisation or re-traumatisation in the response process, a risk widely recognised by, and reflected in, the procedural obligations imposed by international legal measures (European Union, 2012).

This chapter draws upon our work in supporting and researching the introduction of the Barnahus model in the United Kingdom. We are a group of academics and practitioners from the United Kingdom and Canada with significant experience of working with maltreated children. Our work has focused on the welfare of maltreated children, and how best to intervene in child-centred ways. This work informs our conceptualisation of how the Barnahus model presents both an opportunity and a challenge for existing child welfare and criminal justice systems to more effectively meet many of the above objectives.

We draw upon learning from research we have undertaken in two parts of the United Kingdom. Our argument is that an opportunity exists for the Barnahus model to become a disruptor of the system as is, and to deliver improved outcomes not only for children, but also the wider child welfare and criminal justice systems. “Disruptor” is a term for describing a process of making significant systems changes that will uphold children’s rights to truly child-centred responses and interventions. Otherwise, there is a risk that a Barnahus will be co-opted into the system that currently exists, and therefore, the fault lines in responding to children’s experiences of maltreatment may be masked, or papered over, rather than being fundamentally addressed. We will discuss the Barnahus model as disruptor in greater detail later in the chapter. We argue that the introduction of the Barnahus model provides an opportunity for a fundamental reimagining of the relationship between the child welfare and justice systems, as well as the opportunity to rebalance from the needs of the justice system to those of the needs of children.

Child Welfare Within the United Kingdom

Whilst the United Kingdom is a single country, it consists of four nations—England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The national UK government has primary responsibility for all matters, but various powers and duties are devolved to legislatures in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, including responsibilities for education, health, policing, the courts, and social services. As such, most matters relating to the investigation, management, and prosecution of child maltreatment are matters for the governments in Belfast, Cardiff, and Edinburgh. Whilst the child welfare system is similar between the four UK nations, the legislative frameworks and how services are organised vary (Stafford et al., 2011). In essence, though, the systems in each part of the United Kingdom are very similar, in that when concerns arise about a child having been abused or neglected, the primary agencies with initial responsibilities for investigating these concerns are social services and the police. This arrangement is to determine whether any measures are required to keep a child safe from experiencing further harm, and to start the process of gathering evidence that could support a criminal prosecution. Depending on the nature of the concern, the child may also be subject to a paediatric medical examination to assess whether the child is in need of treatment, and also to gather forensic evidence that could support future legal proceedings in both the criminal and family courts. The joint social services and police investigation will often involve an interview with the child, as well as other potential witnesses. The child’s interview is most typically undertaken jointly by a specially trained police officer and a social worker, and is video recorded. This recording of the interview can be used as the child’s “evidence-in-chief” should the matter proceed to court, although children need to be available for cross-examination at any subsequent court hearing. The child’s video-recorded evidence-in-chief is not always used, however, with some children being required to give live testimony at the trial (Beckett & Warrington, 2015).

Each of the UK countries has slightly different arrangements for supporting children as vulnerable witnesses in the court process, but some people have expressed severe unease about the impact on children and their families from the adversarial nature of criminal proceedings, where children are first and foremost witnesses for the prosecution, rather than victims of maltreatment (Cossins, 2020). Subsequently, the issue of the rights of defendants over child victims results in practice that is potentially harmful to such vulnerable witnesses (Prince et al., 2018). As Hayes and Bunting (2013) note, children can experience considerable distress associated with the formal and adversarial nature of criminal courts, arising from a lack of knowledge of the legal system and processes, the potential of seeing the defendant, and, frequently, having to answer questions under cross-examination. Such distress can also be exacerbated by a lack of information about the progress of the case, delays in trial dates, and uncertainty in relation to when they will be called to give evidence. Specifically, courtroom and trial procedures have been developed for adults with mature cognitive and emotional capacities. The developmental capacities of children—for example, in their thinking, comprehension, communication, and coping with intense emotions—have not been sufficiently considered in how they can participate in a system built for adults, and one that is not trauma-informed.

Research into child victims’ experiences of criminal justice processes has been supplemented by a wider body of evidence highlighting the inadequacies of the child welfare and criminal justice systems in meeting the needs of vulnerable children (Gillen, 2019). Such work has noted the fragmented and “siloed” nature of the multi-agency response to victims, with many children opting out of a system that is meant to deliver redress for them because they feel it is exacerbating the trauma they have experienced. The result is a general lack of confidence across society about the seriousness with which state agencies take child maltreatment, and in particular sexual violence.

Within this context, the process and practice of investigating and prosecuting child maltreatment could be strengthened by adopting a new model for how agencies collaborate in meeting the needs of the child welfare and criminal justice systems. The Barnahus model has been of particular interest, with Lord Justice John Gillen, for example, recommending to the government in Northern Ireland that it urgently considers the advantages of introducing a Barnahus.

System Change or Changing Systems

Johansson and colleagues (2017) state that in the Nordic context, the development of the Barnahus model can be seen as part of a longer journey of cultural change in the recognition of children’s experiences of harm and the need to provide them with a comprehensive response that addresses needs relating to their safety, attainment of justice, and the promotion of their recovery. As such, the question arises regarding the main objective of introducing a Barnahus into a pre-existing child welfare and criminal justice system. Wulczyn and colleagues (2010) note that all change within a child welfare system is bi-directional, so we must pay attention to both the change that a new way of working is meant to achieve within the pre-existing system and the change that the larger system, as is, will have on the new model or way of working. This idea is exemplified by Guðbrandsson’s (2017) description of how he and others introduced and integrated the “child advocacy model” from the USA with the “Nordic welfare model” to become the Barnahus model. Whilst certain common and core elements of the model must be in place before a service can be called a Barnahus (PROMISE Barnahus Network, 2017), it is also interesting to note how the model has been adapted and adopted in different countries to fit local legislative and organisational arrangements (Johansson & Stefansen, 2020). Therefore, there is no one singular Barnahus model—rather, Barnahus in different jurisdictions have commonalities—but important differences exist. This flexibility can be a strength, for example, in ensuring that the Barnahus fits the needs and structures of the local context, but the local system could potentially require the Barnahus to bend to its needs and processes as a result of this flexibility. As Johansson and Stefansen (2020) wonder, to what extent does the introduction of a Barnahus promote radical transformational change in the wider system, or incremental change? We argue that the Barnahus model provides an opportunity to recast the ways in which the child welfare and criminal justice systems in the United Kingdom interact in order to yield greater expression to the needs of children and the obligations on governments under the UNCRC. As such, the Barnahus model could potentially become a disruptor of conventional practice. A significant risk, however, is that the policy response to criticisms of the current system (and the poor outcomes on all measures) will be to seek to refine and amend the current systems without having a more fundamental discussion of whether refinement would merely maintain the status quo.

The Barnahus as a Disruptor

Whilst a growing evidence base exists about how new ways of working are introduced into services for children and families (Albers et al., 2017), the literature is more limited on the impact of the new way of working on the system into which it has been introduced, beyond whether it is working or not. A disruptive innovation is one whereby the new way of working or the new model causes the existing system to adopt and adapt to these new ways of working, which have the potential to generate improved (and sometimes different) outcomes. However, consequences for the existing system are also likely. The changes brought about by this disruption are fundamental, rather than incremental, and require participants and stakeholders to reconsider the principles of what the existing way of working is meant to deliver, and to recast those principles. In doing so, practices and ways of working are likely to be significantly different, and the new way of working will ultimately supplant the existing approach. Examples of disruptive models are all around us, from Apple (Christensen et al., 2013) to Uber (Urbinati et al., 2018). In the field of child welfare, we have seen new models of working shape practice, including family group conferences (Mitchell, 2020) and restorative approaches in youth justice (Sherman et al., 2015). Such innovative ways of working have radically shaped the sectors in which they operate (although not always in a positive way, such as the precarious nature of employment in the gig economy), whilst also reshaping wider society. However, just because a model offers a radically new way of doing things does not mean it will disrupt the ecosystem into which it is introduced (Muller, 2020). The new way of working is just as likely to become co-opted by the existing system, and rather than users of the system “leaning into” the new model or way of working, they will adapt the new model, often beyond what users may feel comfortable doing, but they need to do so if the model is to gain acceptance.

The Barnahus model was developed in response to a dissatisfaction with the ways in which maltreated children’s needs for safety, justice, support, and recognition were being addressed at the intersection of different systems. As such, the Barnahus model offers an opportunity to disrupt traditional models of meeting these needs, by forcing the child welfare and justice systems to fundamentally reconsider the a priori assumption that the need to ensure fair judicial processes for the accused requires victims to subsume their needs, and rights, in the interests of justice. However, there is an equal concern that the Barnahus model will merely become a different way of doing business as usual, so fundamentally the focus shifts to the co-location of services in a child-friendly environment (i.e. the Barnahus as place) rather than fundamentally altering the way that children’s needs for safety, justice, support, and recognition are enacted (i.e. the Barnahus as experience).

Methods

Over the past few years, Northern Ireland and Scotland have experienced increasing calls for the introduction of the Barnahus model. In Northern Ireland, the intent is to introduce a Barnahus that will work with children who have been sexually abused, whereas in Scotland, the intention is to establish a Barnahus that will support children who have experienced one or more of a number of harms, such as physical and sexual abuse, as well as those who have experienced domestic abuse, and also children who have harmed other children but are under the age of criminal responsibility. The authors of this chapter have worked with stakeholders (governments and state agencies) in both nations, separately, to explore how the Barnahus model could be introduced, and what changes would be necessary within the wider context to provide an authorising environment for the successful establishment of a Barnahus.

In Northern Ireland, we were commissioned by the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People to undertake research to provide an analysis of current arrangements in cases of sexual offences against children, and the opportunities and challenges within these arrangements in the introduction and application of the Barnahus model to Northern Ireland. In Scotland, we are members of a partnership that secured philanthropic funding to establish Scotland’s (and the United Kingdom’s) first Barnahus, with the authors responsible for the evaluation of the implementation. The data in this chapter is drawn from our completed work in Northern Ireland, and the first phase of our evaluation in Scotland, which has sought to establish the hopes and worries of stakeholders about the introduction of the Barnahus model.

Our work in both jurisdictions has involved focus groups and interviews with policy-makers and senior managers from services that have a key interest in the child welfare and criminal justice processes in each nation when children are subject to maltreatment. In Northern Ireland, 32 middle and senior managers were involved in interviews and focus groups (Lavoie et al., 2022); in Scotland, 33 middle and senior managers were involved in interviews and focus groups (Mitchell et al., 2023b). The participants were identified by their government department or agency as having specialist knowledge on the investigation of child maltreatment concerns. Participants were nominated by their agency and included participants from social services, the police, the courts, the healthcare system, and organisations supporting child victims.

Participants were asked to attend a focus group, or, if unavailable, to be interviewed individually. All discussions were audio recorded, transcribed, and analysed, drawing upon the six-stage, iterative, and reflective approach to thematic analysis developed by Braun and Clarke (2006): familiarisation; initial coding; identifying themes; reviewing themes; defining themes; and evidencing themes in the final write-up. Any initial themes we identified individually were then compared, before the initial analysis was discussed with the research team and refined further.

Drawing upon the learning gained from the interviews and focus groups in both jurisdictions, in the next section, we focus on the learning we have gained. We do not seek to compare the findings from Northern Ireland and Scotland, as that was not the intent of the original discrete studies, but we will focus on a number of common themes that arose.

Findings

The interviews and focus groups with the 65 research participants across both jurisdictions have resulted in a number of key themes, as described in the following sections.

The Juridification of Child Welfare Responses to Maltreated Children

There is unanimous agreement that the current systems and processes for managing the disclosure, investigation, and management of child maltreatment concerns, as well as support for children’s well-being and recovery, are problematic. The participants in our research delineated between the personal commitment of individual practitioners and services to ensure that children are supported to share their experiences, and to do so in ways that would avoid re-traumatisation. This approach fits with the growing evidence of the benefits to be gained from more trauma-informed child welfare and justice system responses to child maltreatment (Quadara & Hunter, 2016). However, practitioners also recognised the inherent tension between being child-centred whilst also practising in ways that would meet the needs of both the family and criminal justice systems. Bakketeig (2017), amongst others, refers to the tendency towards “juridification” within the investigation of child maltreatment, defined as a process where norms constitutive for a political order are established or changed to the effect of adding to the competencies of the legal system. As such, child welfare services adapt their practice to the needs of the police and the prosecutor, since the criminal justice process and outcomes take precedence over the needs for children to be supported and helped to start the recovery process. For example, our participants highlighted the challenges for children in accessing pre-trial therapy for fear that such therapy could undermine the child’s credibility as a witness to their own abuse in subsequent court proceedings—despite both jurisdictions having protocols in place that allow therapy to happen. Discussions about the introduction of the Barnahus model have centred on how the standards required by the justice system to ensure a fair trial have often superseded the views of children and families about what a child-centred recovery service should look like. Hence, discussions in the United Kingdom have started from the premise of what is unable to change within the justice system, or what the Barnahus must be able to deliver to ensure that the justice system can meet its objectives. In this sense, the need to hold an individual to account for causing harm to a child takes precedence over the child’s needs for recognition of their harm, and recovery from the impact of maltreatment. This reality does not exist because individual practitioners (or the system) are indifferent to the needs of the child but rather reflects wider societal expectations that those who harm children must be held accountable, and that this accountability is best discharged through the courts. Lavoie and colleagues (2024), in another chapter in this book, explore the need to problematise what we mean by justice, and for whom. Whilst holding individuals accountable for the harm they have caused, and ensuring that they are punished, is indeed one form of justice, a different kind of justice may be found in the child feeling believed, safe, and supported to move on from the adversity they have experienced, and to begin a process of recovery. This concept is explored more fully in the chapter by Lavoie and colleagues in this book.

Refocusing the Justice Response to Child Maltreatment

In our interviews with stakeholders about the introduction of the Barnahus in Northern Ireland and Scotland, a recurring theme was about how the Barnahus could fit into the current landscape of services and processes, such as, in Scotland, the move to a trauma-informed justice system (Scottish Government, 2022). No one has challenged the a priori assumption that the Barnahus should support this juridification, rather than shifting the balance towards a recovery model that places the child’s needs above those of the justice system. The introduction of the Barnahus provides an opportunity to disrupt this current conceptualisation of justice for children, although that is not guaranteed. Johansson (2011a, b) concludes that the general process of juridification is a consequence of participating in inter-agency collaboration within Barnahus, although it is also clear that within the UK context, that has been a long-standing issue (Beckett & Warrington, 2015; Hayes & Bunting, 2013). Therefore, the introduction of a Barnahus could potentially further consolidate this juridification, thus reflecting much wider discussions about the orientation of the child welfare system in the United Kingdom, and whether a socio-legal paradigm fits best in dealing with issues of child harm that are often relational and more closely connected to structural issues such as poverty, rather than the psycho-pathological characteristics of children’s carers (Featherstone et al., 2018). This issue could be given greater consideration as part of the discussions about the introduction of the Barnahus into the United Kingdom.

A Child-Victim-Centred Service

In part, this juridification can be seen in how the debates in both countries have highlighted a hierarchy within professional discourses and standing. For example, Northern Ireland already has a sexual assault referral centre—which is highly regarded—but it is generally felt to be more adult than child-focused. The needs of the health system required the facility to be sited within the grounds of a large hospital not easily accessible by public transport due to the hospital’s location on the edge of a small, regional town. This setting reinforces the sense that the centre is primarily for dealing with crisis situations, rather than providing ongoing support for victims.

In Scotland, part of the discussion about the system “as is”—the system that the Barnahus would become a part of—has highlighted that the only part of the system subject to commissioning (the process whereby non-state agencies compete to win a contract to provide a service) is that related to recovery work (Mitchell et al., 2023b). The key services related to the investigation and prosecution of child maltreatment are all vested in and delivered by state agencies, whereas a significant proportion of recovery work is delivered by non-state agencies—similar to the case in Northern Ireland. As we highlighted from our work in Northern Ireland:

Participants indicated that a great benefit of the Barnahus model is the fundamental aspect of putting children and families at the forefront, as one of the concerns of the current system is the reoccurrence of children and families who have left the criminal justice and recovery process only to reappear in the system with mental health or safeguarding concerns again years later as a result of unresolved trauma from past experiences of abuse or re-traumatisation through the criminal justice system. Participants across sectors indicated that long-term support should also be available to children and families, e.g. through additional counselling, as children grow older. (Lavoie et al., 2022, pp. 58–59)

Whilst the United Kingdom has a long (and strong) tradition of non-state agencies delivering recovery services for children, this setup often comes at the expense of sustainable levels of funding, and a perception that such services are less essential than services delivered by state agencies (Allnock et al., 2015). This situation is in contrast to that of other European countries, such as Norway, where state agencies are directly responsible for the delivery of recovery services.

Which Children Is the Barnahus for?

A fourth theme from the analysis is the question of which children the Barnahus is for. As mentioned above, whilst most Barnahus centres work with children who have been sexually abused, the Barnahus that is being established in Scotland will work with children who have experienced a range of child harms. Invariably, this is most likely to mean children who have experienced physical and sexual assaults, rather than the much larger number of children who have experienced neglect, or emotional harm, through (for example) living in a family experiencing domestic abuse, but where the child has not been physically injured (Skafida et al., 2022). This situation supports a system that focuses narrowly on incidents of abuse, rather than seeking to mitigate the long-term consequences to children of experiencing any form of maltreatment. There is strong evidence that children who come to the attention of the child welfare system have experienced a range of adversities (Chan et al., 2021), but the Barnahus model, as set out in the Barnahus Quality Standards (PROMISE Barnahus Network, 2017), is predicated on a forensic approach that seeks to focus on a specific incident that is both quantifiable and able to be evidenced. This “neglect of neglect” (McSherry, 2007) stems from what English and colleagues (2005, p. 191) have identified as one of the main difficulties with substantiating child neglect, in that “neglect is the absence of a desired set of conditions or behaviors, as opposed to the presence of an undesirable set of behaviors,” as is the case with abuse. Essentially, it is a far simpler task to identify something that is present, as opposed to something that is not present. However, we also know the significant long-term negative consequences of experiencing a range of childhood adversities and the deleterious impact of physical and emotional neglect (Finlay et al., 2022). This concept points to the need for a more inclusive approach towards which children the Barnahus seeks to cater for, and the balance between the child welfare and criminal justice aspects of the service.

Barnahus as a Space for Children and for Practitioners

Next, participants in our research discussed the potential value of a Barnahus being both a welcoming and therapeutic space, where children could be supported to share their experiences and receive support (i.e. a child-friendly space), alongside being a mechanism for facilitating practitioners from different agencies to work together in a more co-ordinated and effective way to meet children’s needs. Stakeholders felt this contrast of how the Barnahus is conceptualised to be critically important. If the Barnahus was seen only as a child-friendly space but without commensurate changes in how practitioners worked together within and, crucially, outside that space, then children’s experiences were unlikely to be qualitatively different. Therefore, we argue, the house that is the Barnahus space is one crucial element of the model, rather than the house being the entirety of the model. This concept is particularly important, in our view, for stakeholders who may never work in the house, such as advocates and the judiciary. They will need to commit to the Barnahus model as much as those practitioners and agencies more obviously associated with the house itself. Therefore, the Barnahus is about children’s experience throughout their journey of disclosure, legal processes, and therapeutic recovery.

Working with Children who Pose a Risk to Other Children

Finally, our analysis identified a further tension in considering whether and how a Barnahus should work with children who have caused harm to other children. We know that many children who cause harm to others have themselves been subject to significant adversity in life, including maltreatment (Jahanshahi et al., 2022). Lynch and Liefaard (2020) note that the issue of rights for children in conflict with the law puts governments under the obligation to promote children’s well-being, development, and social reintegration whilst reinforcing their respect for human rights and the fundamental freedoms of others. Therefore, state governments are required and have been encouraged to develop specific laws and policies for children in conflict with the law and to invest in the specialisation of professionals, provide responses to dealing with offending behaviour without resorting to judicial proceedings (i.e. diversion), and set an age below which children cannot be held criminally responsible. However, in seeking to view children in conflict with the law as children first—and therefore considering the appropriateness of the Barnahus for initiating the criminal justice response—the issue arises for stakeholders in how children who have caused harm, often to other children, should be supported in the same space as children who have been victimised.

Debates about such issues highlight a fault line in both Northern Ireland and Scotland about the degree to which a hierarchy exists within childhood of whose needs are morally greater. Yet as Case and Bateman (2020) argue, the status and “offenderising” transitions of children who are in conflict with the law are socio-historically contingent, not only on their behaviour and the risk they present to others, but on political, socio-economic, societal, systemic, and demographic grounds. As such, the inclusion in the Barnahus of children who present with problematic behaviour provides both challenges and a potential opportunity for Scotland, and other jurisdictions, to give fuller expression to the UNCRC.

Discussion

The possible introduction of the Barnahus model into Northern Ireland, and the current establishment of a Barnahus in Scotland, has potential for improving the experience and outcomes for victims of child maltreatment. The benefits of the Barnahus model also extend to those who work in such a joined-up approach, with the potential for helping the wider child welfare and criminal justice systems work more effectively and efficiently (Lavoie et al., 2022). We have sought to argue in this chapter, however, that whilst senior service managers and policy-makers look at how a Barnahus could fit into a pre-existing system and fix some of the obvious problems with the system as is, the opportunity may be lost for considering a more fundamental change. In this sense, a Barnahus could become a disruptor to the current system. This is not the same as saying that a Barnahus would destabilise the current system; rather, it provides an opportunity to ask fundamental questions about what the child welfare and criminal justice systems are seeking to achieve. Therefore, the disruption is about the paradigm and discourse relating to how society responds when a child is identified as being at risk of maltreatment. In this context, should the main discourse be about who is responsible and how they should be held accountable? Or rather, what has gone wrong, and how can we seek to rectify matters for the child? These questions are not mutually exclusive, but the weight we attach to them shifts how we construct the role and purpose of the service response. In addition, this question also affects the resources that are made available for those responses, an argument currently being advanced in relation to adult victims of domestic violence (Goodmark, 2018). Significant amounts of public funding go to the criminal justice aspects of child maltreatment, whilst only a fraction of funding is made available to support children’s recovery from maltreatment. The introduction of a Barnahus, in and of itself, will not bring all the change required, but it could disrupt our current conceptualisations of what services are seeking to achieve and how they might do that. In essence, the debate involves more than the Barnahus as a place where maltreated children can receive a number of services in a child-friendly space. It involves the Barnahus becoming a way of working with children and their families that will drive improvements in the entirety of children’s experiences in the family and justice systems. Therefore, the discussion involves what needs to happen away from the house itself as well as children’s experiences within the house. For that to occur, however, we must consider a number of important considerations that have arisen from our research.

Firstly, we must differentiate between establishing the Barnahus and leading the wider system change. In our research in Northern Ireland, we differentiated between the need for strategic leadership and operational leadership (Lavoie et al., 2022). Strategic leadership refers to high-level commitments to the aims and principles of the model, and to sponsoring the systemic and policy changes required to achieve these factors. Introducing a new model into a complex system that involves different disciplines, agencies, and government departments requires high-level authorisation and support. Typically, such support will occur at the ministerial level; only when such support is in place can those charged with operationalising the model feel able to do so.

Northern Ireland and Scotland are approaching the establishment of their Barnahus centres from different directions. In Scotland, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) called Children 1st has secured funding from a philanthropic source to establish the first Bairns’ Hoose (a Scottish term for Barnahus) and to undertake a realist evaluation of the setup of the service. Children 1st has established a reference group of middle and senior managers from key state and non-state agencies and services to promote the model and to look at the practicalities of introducing the Barnahus model. Helpfully, this group is called “Delivering the Vision,” reflecting the need to think about the vision alongside the practicalities. Importantly, the Scottish government has now committed to a roll-out of the Barnahus model in the next few years.

In contrast, in Northern Ireland, the Commissioner (Ombudsman) for Children and Young People has led calls for the full implementation of Sir John Gillen’s recommendation regarding a Barnahus (Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People, 2020), resulting in a commissioned report (Lavoie et al., 2022) and a roundtable with Justice and Health ministers to discuss the report’s conclusions. Both approaches have benefits whilst also highlighting the need for high-level sponsorship of the model for those who are responsible for the actual delivery. However, this matter is about more than governance. The existence of high-level sponsorship and leadership has much potential for innovation, capacity, and funding whilst also helping to navigate the various hidden and visible power dynamics that will shape the overall purpose and mandate of the Barnahus. The situation also requires bravery from those in leadership positions to challenge the system “as is” and to require more systemic change; it requires working across systems, rather than just working within each system.

As such, there is a need to clarify which outcomes the child welfare and criminal justice systems seek, and the role of the Barnahus in that regard. Such clarification will require key stakeholders to confront the primacy of child welfare over criminal justice considerations—whilst also seeking to ensure that criminal justice outcomes are still possible for both the child and wider society. In such a scenario, the long-standing hierarchy and supremacy would be flipped to become more equal and (in the case of criminal justice) subservient to the needs of the child. Doing so will require leadership within individual agencies and professions, mandated by those who span the system and provide legitimacy, such as government ministers. Such changes will also require engaging with powerful lobbies related to the operation of the system “as is,” such as those representing defendants. Defence advocates play a legitimate role in the operation of the criminal justice system, but their defence of the rights of the accused has resulted in a skewing of the processes for how allegations are gathered and scrutinised. We have seen some positive signs of a more victim-centred justice system (Victim Support Scotland, 2021), but progress is patchy and not helped by the twin pandemics of austerity and Covid-19 (Godfrey et al., 2022).

Next, we must consider who the Barnahus is meant to help—all children in need of state intervention, including those who have caused harm, or just those who have been victimised?—as well as the types of harm. In most jurisdictions, the Barnahus model has focused primarily on children who have been sexually assaulted. However, we also know that most children who experience one type of harm have also experienced other types of harm (Chan et al., 2021). As a consequence, the broader the mandate, the wider the range of skills and expertise required by the service and the professionals working there. We also need to start thinking about children through an intersectional lens, thinking not only of the types of harm experienced but also a child’s needs in relation to other important factors that may compound or shape the impact of such harm—for example, whether they are disabled, whether their first language is the majority language in that jurisdiction, and whether any religious or cultural factors need to be considered. The participants in our research stated that the system needs to be flexible enough to avoid a prescribed approach that is in the “best interests of children generally” rather than the “best interests for this particular child.” International treaties, and the obligations on states flowing from the same, need to be embraced and given expression through the child welfare and criminal justice systems, as well as specific services such as the Barnahus model.

Finally, a growing movement has developed over the past two decades to involve the end users or beneficiaries of public services in co-designing the aims of the service and the ways such services should work. Those in the Barnahus movement have much experience of such approaches (Hill et al., 2021; Mitchell et al., 2023a), but such approaches are less obvious in the system “as is.” Where such work has taken place, it has more typically occurred in relation to the child welfare system, or the experiences of the criminal justice system (Beckett & Warrington, 2015). A truly child-centred approach would start from children’s perspective of what they feel they need.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have argued that the Barnahus model provides an opportunity within the UK context to reconsider how the child welfare and criminal justice systems work together with children who have experienced maltreatment. Drawing upon a significant number of interviews and focus groups with middle and senior managers in services and policy circles in two nations of the United Kingdom, we conclude that politicians and policy-makers need to be brave. Rather than seeing the Barnahus as another part of the existing landscape, they should take the opportunity to use the introduction of the Barnahus to disrupt how we think about the state’s response to child maltreatment. This disruption will require a fundamental reimagining of the relationship between the child welfare and justice systems, and the need to subordinate the outcomes of the justice system to those of the needs of the individual child. For example, ensuring that children can receive therapy in the immediate aftermath of abuse could be facilitated by children’s testimony in the chief and cross-examination that happens at the point of disclosure. This approach is inevitably about the transaction of power, and the redistribution of the power within the professional system.

Children should expect to be kept safe and to have justice, but they also require the opportunity to rebuild their lives and to recover from the harm they have experienced. It is morally wrong that children should feel further victimised, even inadvertently, by the system that is meant to be providing security and redress. As such, the introduction of the Barnahus model should avoid being the paper that covers over the cracks within the current system and processes. Instead, it should, and could, provide an opportunity for the current child welfare and criminal justice systems to be truly empowering and transformative in the lives of children who have already experienced so much adversity.