Written about, never asked — Two German studies on liability, documentation and the missing voice of the child

German family courts decide about children on the strength of what is written in the file. These two papers ask who writes it, under what incentives, and how a child’s own account came to be dispensable. This note introduces two German working papers of 2026 to readers outside Germany. „Guarantor without means“ explains why qualified staff leave child and youth services altogether: criminal liability attaches to the individual caseworker and is discharged by the documented reasoning, not by the outcome for the child. „The invisible ones“ applies one test to the founding texts of the West and to German constitutional law: whether a child’s own point of view is ever a source in them.