What do we know about children’s representation in child protection decisions? A scoping review

This scoping review presents an overview of existing research about children’s representation in child protection decision-making and identifies the knowledge gaps. Representation arrangements to ensure that children’s views and/or best interests are heard are crucial as children, caregivers, and social workers often cannot represent children adequately. This international peer-reviewed scoping review entails an extensive search for peer-reviewed research articles in English and Norwegian, published between 1990 and 2022, identifying 51 relevant studies from 7,800 unique articles. Thematic analysis revealed that existing research has examined various dimensions of how representation is carried out and perceived, including representatives’ roles, child—representative contact, and the value of representation. Children often lacked representation and commented on relationships and representation being valuable. While the knowledge base is stronger in these areas, it is clear that we do not know much about children’s representation overall. There are considerable knowledge gaps related to a predominance of small-scale qualitative studies, brief coverage of some subdimensions of representation, and several studies with a broader research focus than representation. Following the direction of this scoping review, future research should focus on patching up the research gaps on children’s representation in child protection decision-making. By identifying the existing research base and frontier, we can prioritize new research, test existing knowledge, and make arrangements that benefit children.