Child Welfare Services’ Assessments of the Best Interests of the Child from an Ethical Perspective

This article adopts an ethical perspective on child welfare practice. Drawing on interviews with parents whose children have been taken into care from the project “Care Orders from a Parental Perspective”, we show how an ethical lens offers alternative ways of thinking about the best interests of the child. We argue that different knowledge perspectives yield different understandings and assessments of the best interests of the child when child welfare services (CWS) consider removing children from their parents.