For centuries, residential child and youth care systems worldwide have provided homes for vulnerable children and adolescents. The implementation of children's rights, especially the right of participation, is assessed as an important base for promoting the best interests of the child in an out-of-home care environment. Featuring contributions from distinguished international authors, this volume offers an in-depth understanding of crucial participation processes and underlying power structures when involving young people in decision-making about their care and everyday life in different out-of-home care institutions. Contributions cover a broad spectrum of current research findings concerning the participation of young people in foster families and residential living groups in Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland as well as cross-nationals perspective on children and young people’s participation in foster and residential care placements in Great Britain and France. The volume fills major gaps concerning the participation of young people in different out-of-home care and policy settings and will be required reading for policymakers, researchers, practitioners, scholars, and students interested in increasing opportunities for young people’s participation and creating better out-of-home care settings for vulnerable young people.

This open access book critically explores what child protection policy and professional practice would mean if practice was grounded in human rights standards. This book inspires a new direction in child protection research – one that critically assesses child protection policy and professional practice with regard to human rights in general, and the rights of the child in particular. Each chapter author seeks to approach the rights of the child from their own academic field of interest and through a comparative lens, making the research relevant across nation-state practices. The book is split into five parts to focus on the most important aspects of child protection. The first part explains the origins, aim, and scope of the book; the second part explores aspects of professionalism and organization through law and policy; and the third part discusses several key issues in child protection and professional practice in depth. The fourth part discusses selected areas of importance to child protection practices (low-impact in-house measures, public care in residential care and foster care respectively) and the fifth part provides an analytical summary of the book. Overall, it contributes to the present need for a more comprehensive academic debate regarding the rights of the child, and the supranational perspective this brings to child protection policy and practice across and within nation-states. .

Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes the right to participation: children and adolescents are entitled to participate and to have their views taken into account in all issues affecting them in accordance to their age and maturity. The volume explores this right to participation in residential care. The impact of participation and complaint procedures in residential care facilities are evaluated by means of crucial results from an empirical study. How do these participation and complaints procedures work? The authors discuss crucial facilitators and barriers with regard to the implementation of children’s rights to participate.

The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has inspired advocates and policy makers across the globe, injecting children's rights terminology into various public and private arenas. Children's right to participate in decision-making processes affecting their lives is the acme of the Convention and its central contribution to the children's rights discourse. At the same time the participation right presents enormous challenges in its implementation. Laws, regulations and mechanisms addressing children's right to participate in decision-making processes affecting their lives have been established in many jurisdictions across the globe. Yet these worldwide developments have only rarely been accompanied with empirical investigations. The effectiveness of various policies in achieving meaningful participation for children of different ages, cultures and circumstances have remained largely unproven empirically. Therefore, with the growing awareness of the importance of evidence-based policies, it becomes clear that without empirical investigations on the implementation of children's right to participation it is difficult to promote their effective inclusion in decision making. This book provides a much-needed, first broad portrayal of how child participation is implemented in practice today. Bringing together 19 chapters written by prominent authors from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and Israel, the book includes descriptions of programs that engage children and youth in decision-making processes, as well as insightful findings regarding what children, their families, and professionals think about these programs. Beyond their contribution to the empirical evidence on ways children engage in decision-making processes, the volume's chapters contribute to the theoretical development of the meaning of "participation," "citizenship," "inclusiveness," and "relational rights" in regards to children and youth. There is no matching to the book's scope both in terms of its breadth of subjects and the diversity of jurisdictions it covers. The book's chapters include experiences of child participation in special education, child protection, juvenile justice, restorative justice, family disputes, research, and policy making.

What rights do young people living in residential care have? How can residential staff and managers implement the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child? Why is participation important and how can adults help young people make decisions? Where can young people get independent help and advice? Children's Rights and Participation in Residential Care, the first practical guide of its kind, clearly addresses these - and many other - issues which were central to residential care in the 1990s. Arising from a two-year NCB project, this informative book charts the role of young people in developing and improving residential services and provides a comprehensive summary of research into young people's experiences. After outlining the legal entitlements of young people who live in residential care, the book provides many useful suggestions about how staff and managers can increase young people's participation. Children's Rights and Participation in Residential Care will prove invaluable to all those practitioners, managers and students who want to help create residential homes which respect and value the rights of young people.

"This volume shows how children and young people, child protection practitioners, scholars, and non-governmental organizations promote children's participation in their practice and research. It presents multiple pathways to children and young people's participation in various national contexts. Its starting point is Article 12 of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), the legal platform establishing children's right to participation at the international level. Article 12 emphasizes that UN member states must ensure that children express their views and that these views count according to children's age and maturity in administrative and judicial proceedings (United Nations, 2020, n.d.). General Comment 12 about Article 12 further explains the scope of participation:"

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is the only UN treaty to date in which the people who are its target, that is disabled people, were actively involved in its drafting and the only one which requires the active participation of disabled people in its implementation. This does not, of course, automatically guarantee the direct participation of all disabled people. This is especially so for children with disabilities, whose status as legal minors may inhibit them from participating in decisions affecting their lives. This book focuses on the participation rights of the disabled child with regard to health, education, homelife and relationships, highlighting ways in which these rights are safeguarded and promoted throughout the EU, as well as exploring the factors that put these rights at risk. Finally, this groundbreaking text analyses whether disabled children’s needs for assistance in order to realise their participation rights results in fewer opportunities to participate or in an increase in support in order for them to be able to do so.