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Human Rights in
Child Protection
Implications for Professional Practice and Policy
Edited by
Asgeir Falch-Eriksen and
Elisabeth Backe-Hansen
Human Rights in Child Protection
Asgeir Falch-Eriksen
Editors
Human Rights in
Child Protection
Implications for Professional Practice
and Policy
Editors
Asgeir Falch-Eriksen Elisabeth Backe-Hansen
Norwegian Social Research Norwegian Social Research
Oslo Metropolitan University Oslo Metropolitan University
Oslo, Norway Oslo, Norway
ISBN 978-3-319-94799-0 ISBN 978-3-319-94800-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94800-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018953042
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This book is an open access publication.
Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to
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Preface
Next year will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the UN Convention on

the Rights of the Child. The convention is a catalogue of rights that,
among other things, is meant to safeguard children from maltreatment.
Children living in nation-states claiming to abide by the convention
should also be able to make a claim based on their right to protection.
The child’s right to protection, specified in Art. 19 of the convention, is
intended to establish child protection services that ensure that children
develop and experience their childhoods in safe family environments.
For the anniversary, we seek to move on from discussing the validity
and formal content of the convention, and focus on how it can become
operative in the field of practice. This book aims at exploring what human
rights, and especially the Convention on the Rights of the Child, entail
for child protection services, for professional practice and policy.
It has not been an easy book to develop. Theorizing rights-based pro-
fessional child protection practice is in many ways still in its infancy, as is
the development of policy and practice guidelines based on human rights.
Thus, writing chapters aiming to do all three has been an interesting chal-
lenge to both authors and editors. We hope the results of our efforts will
be helpful to child protection workers, and to educators and policymak-
ers who aim to develop rights-based practice in child protection.
We wish to thank the contributors for their efforts and patience during
the two to three years it has taken to develop the book. Also, we wish to
v
vi Preface
thank Oslo Metropolitan University for funding open access, and for
funding working seminars together with NOVA—Norwegian Social
Research.
Oslo, Norway Asgeir Falch-Eriksen

April 2018 Elisabeth Backe-Hansen
Contents
1 Child Protection and Human Rights: A Call

for Professional Practice and Policy 1
Asgeir Falch-Eriksen and Elisabeth Backe-Hansen
2 Children’s Right to Protection Under the CRC 15

Kirsten Sandberg
3 Rights and Professional Practice: How to Understand

Their Interconnection 39
Asgeir Falch-Eriksen
4 The Child’s Best Interest Principle across Child Protection

Jurisdictions 59
Marit Skivenes and Line Marie Sørsdal
5 Re-designing Organizations to Facilitate Rights-Based

Practice in Child Protection 89
Eileen Munro and Andrew Turnell
vii
viii Contents
6 Experts by Experience Infusing Professional Practices

in Child Protection 111
Tarja Pösö
7 The Rights of Children Placed in Out-of-Home Care 129

Anne-Dorthe Hestbæk
8 Emergency Placements: Human Rights Limits

and Lessons 147
Elisabeth Gording-Stang
9 Rights-Based Practice and Marginalized Children

in Child Protection Work 167
Bente Heggem Kojan and Graham Clifford
10 In-home Services: A Rights-Based Professional Practice

Meets Children’s and Families’ Needs 185
Øivin Christiansen and Ragnhild Hollekim
11 Embodied Care Practices and the Realization of the Best

Interests of the Child in Residential Institutions
for Young Children 209
Cecilie Basberg Neumann
12 Formal and Everyday Participation in Foster Families:

A Challenge? 227
13 Conclusion: Towards Rights-Based Child Protection

Work 245
Elisabeth Backe-Hansen and Asgeir Falch-Eriksen
Index 255
Notes on Contributors
Editors
Asgeir Falch-Eriksen is a researcher at NOVA/Oslo Metropolitan University.

He has a PhD in political science and specializes in political theory, legal phi-
losophy and the sociology of the professions. He has published multiple research
reports on Norwegian child protection and further publications on the inter-
connection between child protection and human rights.
Elisabeth Backe-Hansen is a professor at NOVA/Oslo Metropolitan
University. She has published extensively on core aspects of child protection,
primarily decision-making, foster/residential care and aftercare. In addition, she
has conducted research on children and young people. She has a special interest
in ethics in child research and children’s participation, with national as well as
international publications.
Contributors
Øivin Christiansen is a researcher at the Regional Centre for Child and Youth
Mental Health and Child Welfare, University of Bergen. He has substantial
experience in research on child protection services in Norway. His main fields of
interests are decision-making in child welfare organizations, children receiving
preventive services and foster care.
ix
x Notes on Contributors
Graham Clifford is Professor Emeritus of Social Work at the Department of

Social Work, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has extensive
research experience within the area of child protection and also other areas of
social work.
Elisabeth Gording-Stang is Professor of Law at the Department of Social
Services, Oslo Metropolitan University and teaches bachelor students in child
protection. Since her PhD dissertation of 2007, on preventive child welfare ser-
vices from the point of view of the child, she has been publishing extensively on
children’s rights and more generally on human rights in child protection and
related legal arenas. She has also been researching confidentiality issues in inter-
departmental collaboration.
Anne-Dorthe Hestbæk has for many years been researching in the field of
child abuse and neglect, children with special needs and out-of-home place-
ments in a cross-cultural context at VIVE—The Danish Center for Social
Science Research. She was one of the founders of the Danish longitudinal cohort
study on children in out-of-home care and still designates children growing up
in foster care or residential care as one of her core fields, combined with social
work studies.
Ragnhild Hollekim is an associate professor at the Department of Health
Promotion and Development at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of
Bergen. Her fields of interests are child welfare, children’s status and rights,
migration, equality and integration.
Bente Heggem Kojan is Associate Professor of Social Work at the Department
of Social Work, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her particu-
lar field of expertise is child protection and inequality.
Eileen Munro is Professor in Social Policy, London School of Economics. Her
background in both philosophy and social work has shaped her research inter-
ests in reasoning skills in child protection, leading to an interest in how organi-
zational cultures help or hinder good-quality reasoning and practice.
Understanding of the complex causal processes in working with families has
triggered a critical interest in the philosophy of social science underlying evi-
dence-based policy and practice movements.
Cecilie Basberg Neumann is Professor in Sociology at Oslo Metropolitan
University. She is also a Gestalt therapist and is interested in professional social
work, gender, class, methodology and social theory. She is the author of Power,
Notes on Contributors
xi
ethics and situated research methodology (Palgrave, 2018, together with Iver
B. Neumann).
Tarja Pösö is Professor in Social Work at the University of Tampere, Finland.
She has studied child protection for many years. Her present research focuses on
the notions of ‘consent’ and ‘objection’ in child protection decision-making,
including risk-intelligent decision-making and how organizations can best sup-
port it. She is currently co-editing books about interviewing children (in
Finnish) and errors made (in English) in child protection. Her research focus is
on child law and children’s rights, including the right of the child to be heard,
the best interests of the child, child protection and asylum-seeking children.
Kirsten Sandberg is Professor of Law, University of Oslo and a member of the
UN Committee on the Rights of the Child 2011–2019, serving as the
Committee’s chairperson 2013–2015. Her research focus is on child law and
children’s rights, including the right of the child to be heard, the best interests of
the child, child protection and asylum-seeking children. She has lectured on
children’s rights to lawyers in Harare, Zimbabwe, and to law students in Yunnan,
China.
Marit Skivenes is a professor in political science at the Department of
Administration and Organization Theory at the University of Bergen, Norway,
and the Director of the Centre for Research on Discretion and Paternalism. She
has written numerous articles about the role of welfare policies, practices to
understand the legitimacy problems modern states face, and child protection
systems. She has led a range of international research projects and been awarded
several prestigious research grants, including a European Research Council
Consolidator Grant in 2016.
Line Marie Sørsdal is a PhD candidate in political science at the Department
of Administration and Organization Theory at the University of Bergen,
Norway. Her research interests are children’s rights, social policy and regulation,
and comparative public administration. She is also the research coordinator of
an EU H2020 consortium on the digital transformation of the state.
Andrew Turnell is a social worker and a co-creator of the Signs of Safety
approach to child protection casework. Andrew acts as a consultant for many
international child protection systems focusing on teaching, distilling and
describing constructive on-the-ground casework and the organizational prac-
tices that support it.
Abbreviations
CASS The Consolidation Act on Social Services 2017 (Denmark)

CPS/CWS Child Protection Services/Child Welfare Services
CRC UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
CWA Child Welfare Act (Finland and Norway)
ECHR European Convention on Human Rights
GC General Comment from the UN Committee on the Rights of
the Child
TABU Well-being among children and young people in care (Denmark)
xiii
List of Pictures
Picture 5.1 My three houses—photos in a series 96

Picture 5.2 A words and pictures story 103
xv
List of Tables
Table 4.1 Child protection systems, child well-being rank, child rights
index65
Table 4.2 The child protection laws 67
Table 4.3 Codes for identifying themes in the texts 68
Table 4.4 Main findings 70
Table 4.5 Strong discretion and material content 80
Table 4.6 Considerations in legislation that authorizes weak discretion 81
Table 5.1 Signs of safety assessment and planning framework 92
Table 7.1 CRC articles and out-of-home care 133
Table 7.2 Risk indicators in out-of-home care 137
Table 7.3 Satisfaction with life in out-of-home care 140
Table 10.1 Reasons for providing in-home measures 191
xvii
1
Child Protection and Human Rights:
A Call for Professional Practice
and Policy
Asgeir Falch-Eriksen and Elisabeth Backe-Hansen
1 Introduction
Professional practice is a defining trait of modernity, and democratic and
constitutional nation-states depend on professional practitioners and their
efforts to solve problems and coordinate activity in order to distribute state
services as accurately as possible, thus dealing with the particular problem
at hand of implementing human rights. Throughout modern history, legis-
lators in different democratic nation-states have developed complex systems
of implementation to make sure that public resources are distributed at the
street level according to their democratic intent, and in an accurate manner
aimed at solving particular problems. In this manner, state services at the
street level are provided according to predetermined political and legal dis-
tributive standards set by elected officials through regular law-making and
constitutional rights norms. Consequently, professional practice is a cen-
A. Falch-Eriksen (*) • E. Backe-Hansen

Norwegian Social Research, Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway
e-mail: asgeirer@oslomet.no; ebha@oslomet.no
© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Falch-Eriksen, E. Backe-Hansen (eds.), Human Rights in Child Protection,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94800-3_1
2 A. Falch-Eriksen and E. Backe-Hansen
tral tool in the democratic chain of command in the efforts of legislators

to implement democratic policies, and to distribute public goods and
burdens. This is also the case with regard to child protection services.
Within the system of child protection there are countless practitioners
who must abide by the law.
During its nearly thirty years of existence the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has become not only an
international human rights convention, but also a catalogue of rights that
expresses legal norms used by legislators to legitimize systems of child
protection. The convention has been embraced across nation-states glob-
ally, and by legislators who claim to push for a legal development on a par
with the normative ethos of the CRC. Hence, by now the CRC is not just
a banner, but a toolkit that expresses a normative order, that is, a human
rights standard for how to legitimately protect children. Such a standard,
which we will return to throughout the book, attempts to capture the
underlying normative ethos of human rights and the indivisibility of
rights. Incrementally, the CRC has become a point of reference in devel-
oping child protection services, as a way to design decision-making pro-
cedures, understand what constitutes the child’s integrity, and develop
professional practice and policy. This potential is what the book sets out
to explore.
2 The Aim and Scope of the Book

The main aim of the book is to utilize a human rights standard as a prism,
and critically explore what implications human rights have for profes-
sional practice and public policy. In this way, the book will explore and
utilize a normatively substantial and conceptually rich analytical approach
to practices of child protection. Child protection services have deep roots
as public services across many modern nation-states (Fox Harding 2014),
and they all depend on case workers at street level. Although there are
significant variations across nation-states, in recent history most child
protection services are bound to argue that they respect, abide by and
enforce the CRC. Variations exist as to: what public sector the services
belong to; what and how legal rules set the design for child protection
Child Protection and Human Rights: A Call for Professional… 3
services; what interventions are allowed, their frequency, and what

measures could be used; how attached services are to education, health-
and social services; what type of budgetary priority services are given; and
so forth. Rights, on the other hand, are equalizers across nation-states,
although they too are open to variation.
This book will transcend nation-bound rhetoric, albeit predominantly
referencing nation-based empirical research to anchor discussions in the
normative-political development that gradually points in the direction of
increasingly implementing the CRC across policy and professional prac-
tice. Hence, child protection services are developing towards a widely
shared human rights standard across nation-states, which explicitly grant
children the right to protection (cf. CRC Art. 19). The CRC constitutes
a rights-based normative order that has increasingly infused law-making
across the world, and in some nation-states become formal law and even
constitutional law.
Through CRC Art. 19.1, every child is provided the right to
protection:
States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and
educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental
violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or
exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal
guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.
This right can be claimed by any child living within a jurisdiction claim-
ing to abide by the CRC. However, how or whether it will be answered
will vary. Although an international human rights standard has gradually
become a source for legitimizing the public protection of children, this
does not preclude certain strands of politics opposing rights-based pro-
tection. Still, rights-based protection has increasingly become a source of
reference and a standard to strive for across the globe (Gilbert et al. 2011).
If a child is maltreated, a rights-based public protection of children
will enter in loco parentis, in the place of the parent, and intervene to
sustain the child’s personal integrity and aid the child’s development.
Maltreatment, caused by the violence or neglect of care-givers to the det-
riment of the child, must lead to interventions proportionally to the
needs of the child.
3 ‘Lady Justice’ at Street Level

‘Lady Justice’ is the personification of rule-of-law and an important sym-
bol as to what merits the legitimate application of legal rules. She holds a
sword in one hand and a scale in the other, and she carries a blindfold.
Her face shows no significant expression. Rule-of-law is symbolized as
blind because every subject under the law is to be treated equally when
equal, and unequally when unequal. This is referred to as the formal prin-
ciple of equality and is best summed up by the catch-phrase ‘equality
before the law’. The scale symbolizes a transparent process of reasoning,
which ensures that each citizen is judged both according to general and
known laws but also valid laws. Art. 7 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights stipulates that ‘All are equal before the law and are enti-
tled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.’ Art. 7 is
traceable to the constitutional traditions of the USA and France, and has
its modern roots particularly in John Locke and its classical roots in
Aristotle’s Politics (Aristotle 2014). The CRC has its equivalent in Art.
2—the child’s right to not suffer discrimination of any kind.
Justice is not merely a formal precept for equal treatment, but also
equal treatment according to legal rules, and therefore the normative and
political intent of those rules. Consequently, if rule-of-law is to work,
‘Lady Justice’s’ judgments cannot be in conflict with legal rules, nor with
their normative and political intent. If we turn to modern democratic
and constitutional nation-states, which all enforce some version of a prin-
ciple of rule-of-law, ‘Lady Justice’ must also enforce democratically forged
rules. Popular sovereignty thereby becomes embedded into her judg-
ments and judgments become parasitic upon the legitimacy of democ-
racy. In this way, whenever a democratic nation-state passes new rules,
she rules accordingly. Finally, ‘Lady Justice’ carries a sword that symbol-
izes coercion. The sword is the threat of sanctions whenever there is a
breach of the law, and cannot be wielded without the authority of the
law.
As already noted, in modern and complex nation-states, enforcement
of legal rules often depends on professional practitioners at street level
(Lipsky 1980). Legislators do not have the competence, the time or desire
to provide the necessary quality of services in every conceivable case that
confronts the modern nation-state on which its citizens depends.

Legislators thus need to shape decision-making processes, jurisdictions
and organizations in such a way that professional practitioners can han-
dle any type of case within their remit. The legislature authorizes profes-
sional practitioners at street level through rule-of-law, enabling them to
make decisions locally in each case by providing practitioners the man-
date to reach decisions. This involves granting practitioners autonomy to
reach decisions in specific cases by way of a public mandate. In this man-
ner, we can describe the practitioners as a street-level version of ‘Lady
Justice’.
4 Child Protection and Discretion

Those who become authorized to work as ‘Lady Justice’ in child protec-
tion are case-workers in child protection services. They are professional
practitioners set to become part of the democratic chain of command as
implementation agents of politics, and in their capacity as case-workers
they enforce the law and become its final arbiters at street level (Molander
et al. 2012; Rothstein 1998). When case-workers enforce the law, they
have been delegated the authority to exercise discretion. This is what
Robert Goodin characterizes as the positive aspect of discretion, namely
that a case-worker ‘can be said to have discretion if and only if he is
empowered to pursue some social goal(s) in the context of individual
cases in such a way as he judges to be best calculated’ (1986). A case-
worker who departs from pursuing social goals is on the other hand not
enforcing her or his delegated authority in any legitimate manner. In the
public sector the social goal is provided as a democratic mandate, espe-
cially through legal rules, budgets and administrative directives. This is
also where the CRC becomes relevant—namely in that practices that are
argued by legislators are supposed to follow the CRC and become man-
dated through the democratic will to enforce the human rights standard
underpinning the CRC, and thus cannot depart from the convention. If
practice departs from the human rights standard, it will become
challenging to defend a practice as legitimate either according to a prin-
ciple of democracy or a human rights standard.
A delegation of authority to street level implies that case-workers must

reach decisions that are neither in conflict with the law nor in breach of
the intention of the law. While the former is a formal and structural
restriction where case-workers are obligated to justify decisions, the latter
is mainly epistemic and left to the autonomous capabilities of the case-
worker. The autonomy of case-workers implies that case-workers must be
able to reach decisions and justify them in accordance with a type of
knowledge that preserves the intention of the law and the delegated
authority (Molander et al. 2012). To this end, Goodin also provides a
negative characterization of discretion, encapsulating what can be referred
to as epistemic autonomy. Goodin alludes to the fact that discretion does
not make sense if it denotes a complete freedom of choice, that is unteth-
ered autonomy. Hence, discretionary competence, conveyed by a case-
worker, is always in accordance with certain restrictions.
Case-workers in child protection must reach decisions that are in
accordance with the restrictions set by the law, and more specifically the
CRC. They must practice their autonomy according to not just the letter
of the law, but also the normative intent of the law. Goodin refers to this
area of autonomy as ‘a lacuna in a system of rules’. This aspect of discre-
tion refers to an area ‘which is generally governed by rules, but where the
dictates of the rules are indeterminate’ (Goodin 1986). The authorization
of case-workers constitutes the delegation of authority to reach decisions
autonomously, but supposedly predictably according to the intention of
the law.
5 Human Rights and the Right

to Protection
Basic to a human rights standard and a theory of rights are the notion of
individual liberty and the corresponding absence of, and protection
against, unlawful and arbitrary domination. This type of normative
underpinning can be traced back to the classic liberal views especially of
John Locke and Immanuel Kant. Both scholars promulgated a philoso-
phy of individual freedom through constitutional protection, that is
through rights, and with a strict impersonal principle of law especially
underpinned by the principle stipulating the individual’s equality before

the law and non-discrimination. Operative expressions of constitutional-
ism carrying the ideas of Locke and Kant can be found in the preambles
to the constitutions in both France and the USA. The principle of indi-
vidual liberty rings heavily in modern nation-states and in efforts to
implement, maintain and enforce human rights. In order for human
rights to have any purposeful function, they need to be constitutional to
other types of regulation and become universally applied to all who carry
citizenships (see Chap. 3 for further elaboration). An important lesson
from the liberal doctrine is that it constrains popular will and curbs the
manner in which popular sovereignty works, what legal rules can pass,
how public regulation and policy are performed and how public services
are offered at street level through professional practice.
Particularly since the end of the Second World War, human rights have
become embedded in state-constructs across the world, particularly
where upholding the personal integrity of each individual person has
become a hallmark. The development has firmly established the liberal
constitutional democracy as an organizational norm which is optimal for
introducing, maintaining and enforcing human rights. How such an
organizational norm becomes operationalized, through what type of
democracy and what type of constitutionality, nevertheless varies between
nation-states.
Abiding by human rights, by enforcing a human rights standard that
upholds the indivisibility of rights in all relevant matters, will have enor-
mous consequences for the designs of activities in a nation-state, its regu-
lations, organizations and use of knowledge. However, rights must
actively be infused by lawmakers, bureaucrats and professionals through
implementation and enforcement, in each and all actions relevant to col-
lective problems-solving and coordination. In all relevant aspects of dem-
ocratic rule-of-law, the respect of the integrity of each individual as a
matter of human rights must be coherent and visible. By this way of
thinking, modern state-constructs that lay claim to abide by human
rights must let a system of rights become constitutive of any state activity
in the sense that one can clearly trace the system of rights and explain
how the state works by referring to rights.
6 Child Protection as a Public

and Professional Service
Child protection is a public service aimed at protecting children against
detrimental care, that is different types of maltreatment (Kriz and
Skivenes 2014). Services are typically more rule-governed in the most
intrusive cases where child protection services coercively remove children
from their home. This means that on the one hand, the scope of what we
above referred to as negative discretion, in cases involving coercion, is
very narrow (see Burns et al. 2016). So-called in-house measures, on the
other hand, where parents’ and children’s rights to privacy and family life
are not infringed on in a significant manner, are typically less rule-
governed. Through in-house measures, then, the case-worker has more
scope to reach autonomous decisions, and has more responsibility to
enforce the rights of the child. In areas where case-workers’ autonomy is
wide-ranging, their application of epistemic autonomy makes them more
directly accountable.
However, both of types of interventions are structurally and epistemo-
logically rule-governed practices of discretion. As the case-workers at
street level meet families and children who need assistance or protection,
the actions they can initiate are directly linked to the mandate they have
through the delegation of authority. Once this area of discretion is struc-
turally established through law-making, the decisional autonomy of the
case-worker, or in Goodin’s words, the ‘lacuna in a system of rules’, is the
jurisdiction to which professions lay claim to provide the best-practice
norms within the scope of negative discretion (Abbott 1988; Goodin
1986). It is in the lacuna of the system of rules that the case-workers of
child protection take on the traits of what we have discussed earlier as the
street-level ‘Lady Justice’.
Although child protection services across modern nation-states are
organized in different ways, many refer to the CRC as a legitimating
force. In this way, the CRC becomes a legal framework to justify
decision-making, policy development, organizational designs and regu-
lar law-making (see e.g. Skivenes and Sørsdal 2018: Chap. 4 in this
book). The need for professionalization of child protection has grown
out of the legislator’s need to rely on knowledge-based practice within

its services to fulfil its tasks in collective problem-solving and collective
coordination. The push for increasing professionalization is driven by
the development in knowledge about how best to protect children, but
as well by more advanced professional educators and practitioners,
those who receive services, and finally the democratic will embedded in
the legislators pushing to provide certain types of protection and not
others.
When children are subjected to varying degrees of maltreatment by
their care-takers, they need protection. The state, as the only entity to
exercise legitimate coercion, then has the legitimacy to intervene as long
as it can be justified that the intervention is in the child’s best interests (cf.
CRC Art. 3).
In increasingly pluralistic and complex nation-state systems, adequate
and knowledge-based interventions in child protection-cases cannot just
be directed top-down, or decided on in advance, if the rights of the child
are to be enforced. Thus, each decision needs to be made according to
individual interests, needs and preferences. Case-workers needs to assess
each particular child’s care context, comprehend all relevant facets and
act on the concrete distribution of resources to amend any maltreatment
that the child is subjected to. Thus, each professional is delegated the
authority and instructed to define what the problem at hand is, and then
to give an independent evaluation of what is required to solve the particu-
lar problem (Goodin 1986).
7 C
ontents of the Book
In Chap. 2, Kirsten Sandberg explains and explores the right to protec-
tion as it is embedded in CRC Art. 19. The chapter provides a legal
understanding of the child’s right to protection against maltreatment by
care-takers, and it also explores the obligations of states parties in imple-
menting the right to protection in professional practice and in policy. The
rights and obligations form the framework within which to exercise pro-
fessional judgment in the area of child protection, and specifying their
content is a prerequisite for rights to be realized. The focus is on the

obligations to prevent and respond to maltreatment as well as on the best
interests of the child.
In Chap. 3, Asgeir Falch-Eriksen explains what human rights entail for
professional practice. The chapter elaborates theoretically and analytically
using a counterfactual, namely that human rights, and in particular the
CRC, is a standard point of reference for professional practitioners and
practices within and across nation-state systems of child protection. The
chapter elaborates on how rights challenge professional practice, and how
to best answer some of these challenges. It especially focuses upon how to
understand the child’s right to liberty once adulthood kicks in, and how
development must be carefully plotted out to maintain the integrity of
the person through to adulthood.
In Chap. 4, Marit Skivenes and Line Marie Sørsdal discuss how the
rights of the child are operative in legislation across nation-states. The
chapter studies how governments have a range of steering mechanisms
and incentives to guide and rein in professional use of discretion in
decision-making. In their study, they examine how governments set a
standard for decision-making about the best interests of the child in
intrusive interventions. The empirical focus is the formulation of the
principle of the child’s best interest in child protection legislation in 14
countries.
In Chap. 5, Eileen Munro and Andrew Turnell illustrate the way the
role of professionals is constructed within an organization, and how the
design of such organizations helps or hinders them. They will use England
as an example that illustrates the range of organizational change that has
been needed both to allow and also to support rights-based practice.
In Chap. 6, Tarja Pösö discusses how Art. 12 of the CRC, which is the
child’s right to participation, is operative through organizations of pre-
dominantly children with experience from child protection services, so-
called ‘experts by experience’. The chapter discusses how their messages
influence child welfare policy and practice. The focus is on one particular
Finnish group of experts by experience, and its immense impact on pol-
icy and practice.
In Chap. 7, Anne-Dorthe Hestbæk examines the rights of young peo-
ple in out-of-home care. The chapter utilizes five articles in CRC as a
lever to critically assess whether or not they are operative in professional

practice. The chapter highlights, for example, participation, protection
against harm, and whether or not children feel cared for or loved. The
chapter reaffirms the findings that young people being placed in institu-
tional care seem to live under considerably more disadvantaged condi-
tions than young people in foster care.
In Chap. 8, Elisabeth Gording-Stang problematizes practices of emer-
gency cases in child protection, and how child protection services some-
times must intervene without traditional legal safeguards. She uses court
decisions to shed light on how fundamental contradicting interests are
being considered and balanced by the courts, and how professional prac-
tice at the street level may learn from it.
In Chap. 9, Bente Kojan and Graham Clifford discuss whether the
avowed aim of a preventative approach in child protection, with strate-
gies that set out to avoid the very large moral and economic costs of
placement outside the family, is at all well served by the prevailing distri-
bution of child protection assistance to families and children. They dis-
cuss how rights-based, professional child protection work might be of
help.
In Chap. 10, Øivin Christiansen and Ragnhild Hollekim discuss how
principles of the CRC inform and challenge the practices of professionals
engaged in child welfare services’ preventive in-home measures. The dis-
cussion centres on the threefold relationship between the child, the par-
ents and the state. They question where to place the threshold for public
intervention in family life, and how to realize children’s rights to services
when their parents do not give their consent. They further discuss reasons
for and consequences following the fact that support to children is pri-
marily strived for through targeting parents. Finally, the chapter prob-
lematizes three possible consequences: the homogenization of parenthood,
reduction of complexity and the marginalization of children themselves.
In Chap. 11, Cecilie Basberg Neumann draws attention to the mean-
ing of social workers’ conduct of care practices with young children living
in residential child protection institutions. She is interested in identifying
what good care practices may be, and to discuss how these practices may
be understood as realizations of CRC Art. 3, on the best interests of the
child. Through observations and articulations of what social workers do
when they provide care for children in residential institutions, she

attempts to show that good care practices for young children have a lot to
do with the social worker’s willingness to engage in sensitive, responsible
and embodied interactions with the children.
In Chap. 12, Elisabeth Backe-Hansen focuses on CRC Art. 12 as it
pertains to foster children. In addition to participation rights that all
children share, foster children have a set of administrative participation
rights related to their case. Foster parents have to share their parental
authority with persons of authority outside of the family. In contrast, she
discusses children’s participation in everyday decision-making as an inte-
gral part of family life, and what challenges may occur when foster chil-
dren and other children with participatory rights must interact.
The concluding chapter summarizes the main findings and discusses
their interconnection.
8 Conclusion
We are living in a time when systems of child protection across modern
nation-states receive massive criticism both nationally and internation-
ally. In particular, this pertains to out-of-home placements of children,
against parents’ expressed wishes. Voluntary in-house measures are mostly
ignored in this context. Different nation-states’ politicians, public offi-
cials, NGOs, professionals, scholars, the traditional and new media, all
participate in these discussions, from various points of departure. Since
child protection is characterized by controversy as well as being an aca-
demic field submerged in normative complexity and uncertainty, answers
and heated discourses about what constitutes ‘the best’ type of protection
abound.
However, rights are an equalizer, and children living in jurisdictions
that claim to abide by rights should not experience widely different prac-
tices if said practices are supposed to abide by the same framework of
legislation. Although there are widely different ways to perform child
protection services, the CRC provides us for the time being a common
goal.
References
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Fox Harding, L. (2014). Perspectives in child care policy. London: Routledge.
Gilbert, N., Parton, N., & Skivenes, M. (2011). Child protection systems:
International trends and orientations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Goodin, R. E. (1986). Welfare, rights and discretion. Oxford Journal of Legal
Studies, 6(2), 232–261.
Kriz, K., & Skivenes, M. (2014). Street-level policy aims of child welfare work-
ers in England, Norway and the United States: An exploratory study. Children
and Youth Services Review, 40, 71–78.
Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the individual in public
services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Molander, A., Grimen, H., & Eriksen, E. O. (2012). Professional discretion and
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Rothstein, B. (1998). Just institutions matter. The moral and political logic of the
universal welfare state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Skivenes, M., & Sørsdal, L. M. (2018). The child’s best interest principle across
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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons
license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.
2
Children’s Right to Protection
Under the CRC
Kirsten Sandberg
1 Introduction
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) recognizes chil-
dren as rights holders and provides them with individual rights. The aim
of this chapter is to provide the reader with a legal understanding of
children’s right to protection against maltreatment in their homes and the
obligations of states parties in implementing this right in practice. The
rights and obligations form the framework within which to exercise pro-
fessional judgment in this area, and specifying their content is a pre-
requsite for rights to be realized.
Children’s rights under the CRC are commonly divided into three cat-
egories, and protection rights are one of those, beside provision rights
and participation rights (Hammarberg 1990, p. 100). However, chil-
dren’s rights are indivisible and holistic and should not be seen separately
or in isolation from each other. This book is about child protection, but
K. Sandberg (*)
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
e-mail: kirsten.sandberg@jus.uio.no
© The Author(s) 2018 15

A. Falch-Eriksen, E. Backe-Hansen (eds.), Human Rights in Child Protection,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94800-3_2
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mettle by pretending to doubt his prowess with sword and rapier, and
his skill generally in the noble art of fencing. She challenged him to
measure weapons with her, and piqued at the idea of one younger
than himself pretending to martial superiority, he cast aside his
shyness, and the two falling on guard, clashed and clattered their
steel in the galleries and chambers of the house, from morning till
night, until the noise grew intolerable, and their weapons were taken
away from them, in the fond hope of securing peace and quietness.
It was, however, only partially realised; since the enforced idleness
of Ninon’s hands suggested the surreptitious annexing of the head
forester’s gun, with which she took aim at the blackbirds in the park
avenues, and the young does in the forest: and then, seeking further
variety, the two manned the pleasure-boat on the lake, and fared into
such perilous places, that the voyages became strictly tabooed, and
the boat was hidden away.
The constant tintamarre of the pair frequently brought its
punishment; and one day, on the occasion of a too outrageous
disturbance, they were locked into the library. Books they had no
particular mind for that glorious sunshiny morning; still less enjoyable
was the prospect of the promised dinner of dry bread and water, and
they sat gloomily gazing upon the softly-waving boughs of the trees,
and up through the open window into the free blue sky. Being some
eighteen feet from the ground, it had not been thought necessary to
bar the casement beyond possibility of their trying to escape. The
feat would assuredly not so much as suggest itself. Nevertheless,
the temptation crept into the soul of Ninon, and she quickly imparted
it to Marsillac.
Looking down, they saw that soft green turf belted the base of the
wall, and taking hurried counsel, they climbed to the window-sill, and
at the risk of their necks, clutching by the carved stonework, and the
stout old ivy trails with which it was mantled, they dropped to the
ground, and then away they hied by the clipped yew alleys,
mercilessly trampling the parterres—away till they found themselves
in the forest. Free now as the sweet breeze playing in their hair, they
ran on, pranking and shouting, now following the little beaten tracks,
now bounding over the brushwood, heedless of the rents and
scratches of the thorny tangles; until after some hours, Marsillac’s
pace began to drag, and very soon he said he was tired.
“That is no matter,” said Ninon, “we will hire a carriage at the first
place we come to”; but the name of that place was not even to be
guessed at; inasmuch as they had not the least notion which way
they had taken. The great thing was to arrive at last at Tours, where
Ninon said they could at once enlist as soldiers. Marsillac was,
however, tired—very tired; his legs ached, and he sat down for a little
rest, observing rather crossly, in the cynical way which sometimes he
had, that talking was all very well; but for one thing they were not big
enough for soldiers, and for another, you could not have a carriage
without paying for it.
“Of course not,” acquiesced Ninon, proudly producing her double
louis. “Can I not pay?” But the hours passed, the sun declined, and
not so much as a solitary cottage had presented itself to their eyes,
into which a shade of anxiety had crept; and ere long they began to
feel certain they saw wolves and lions and bandits lurking in all
directions behind the huge black forest tree-trunks, and young
Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld had now grown so tired that, he
wanted nothing so much as to go to bed. Even supper was a
secondary consideration. Still, desperately hungry as they both were,
liberty is such a glorious thing; and were they not free?—free as the
air that was growing so chilly, and the pale moonlight rays as they
broke through some darkening clouds, seemed to make it almost
shuddery. These, however, suddenly crossed something white, and
though terrifying for the moment, the second glance to which they
schooled themselves brought reassurance. The white patch they
saw was a bit of a cottage wall pierced by a little lattice, through
which gleamed the yellow light of a tallow candle; for the two,
creeping close to the panes, peeped in. But noiselessly as they
strove to render their movements, the attention of a couple of big
dogs of the boule-dogue breed was aroused, to the extent of one of
them fastening upon Marsillac’s haut-de-chausses, and he was only
induced to forbear and drop off, under the knotty, chastising stick of
a man, apparently the master of the house, who turned upon the
trembling truants, and bade them clear off for the vagabonds they
were. Their mud-stained and torn apparel, rendered more
dilapidated in Marsillac’s case, by the dog’s teeth, justified to a great
extent the man’s conclusions; but on their asseverating that they
were not good-for-nothing at all; but two very well-born young
gentlemen who had lost their way, and would be glad to pay
generously for a supper, he called his wife, and committing them to
her care, bade her entertain them with the best her larder afforded,
and to put a bottle of good wine on the table. Then he went out,
while an excellent little piece of a haunch of roe-deer—cooking
apparently for the supper of the worthy couple themselves—which
Dame Jacqueline set before the hungry wanderers, was heartily
appreciated by both. Washed down by a glass or two of the fairly
good wine, Marsillac grew hopelessly drowsy. Tired out, he wanted
to go to bed. “And why not?” said the dame, not without a gleam of
malice in her eyes, which had been keenly measuring the two—“but I
have only one bed to offer you, our own, and you must make the
best of it.” She smiled on.
“Not I,” said Ninon, rising from the settle like a giant refreshed—“I
am going on to Tours. The moon is lovely. It will be delightful. How
much to pay, dame? And a thousand thanks for your hospitality.
Come, Marsillac,” and Ninon strode to the door. But the glimpses of
the pillows within the shadow of the alcove had been too much for
Marsillac, and he had already divested himself of his justaucorps,
and jumped into bed.
“And now, my young gentleman, what about you?” inquired
Jacqueline of the embarrassed Ninon, who seated herself
disconsolately on a little three-legged stool. “Come, quick, to bed
with you!”
“No!” said Ninon, “I prefer this stool.”
“Oh, ta! ta! that will never do,” said Jacqueline, who was beginning
to heap up a broad old settle with a cushion or two, and some wraps.
“Sooner than that, I would sit on that stool myself all night, and give
you up my place here beside my—Ah! à la bonne heure! There he
is,” she cried, as the heavy footsteps of the master of the house,
crunching up the garden path, amid the barking of the dogs, grew
audible—“and, as I say, give you up my own place—”
“Ah, mon Dieu! no,” distractedly cried Ninon, tearing off her cloak;
and bounding into the alcove, to the side of the already fast asleep
Marsillac, she dragged the coverings over her head.
“Well, good-night! Sweet repose, you charming little couple,”
laughed on Dame Jacqueline, as she drew the curtains to. “But I’d
not go to sleep yet awhile, look you. Some friends of yours are
coming here to see you. Ah yes, here they are! This way, ladies.”
And the next moment, Madame de Montaigu and the Duchesse de
la Rochefoucauld stood within the alcove, gazing down with glances
beyond power of words to describe.
Dragged by the two ladies from their refuge, Marsillac was hustled
into his garments, but Ninon was bidden to leave hers alone, and to
don the petticoats and bodice which the baroness had brought for
the purpose. “No more masquerading, if you please,” said her aunt,
in tones terrible with indignation and severity, “while I have you under
my charge. Now, quick, home with you!”
And home they were conducted, disconsolate, crestfallen, arriving
there in an extraordinarily short space of time; for the château lay not
half a league off, and the two runaways, who had imagined that the
best part of Touraine had been covered by them that fine summer
day, discovered that the mazes of the forest paths had merely led
them round and about within hail of Loches, and Dame Jacqueline
and her husband had at once recognised them. The man had then
hastened immediately to the château, and informed the ladies, to
their indescribable relief, about the two good-for-nothings; for the
hue and cry after Mademoiselle Ninon and young Monsieur de la
Rochefoucauld had grown to desperation as the sun westered lower
and lower.
Ninon wept tears of chagrin and humiliation at the penalty she had
to pay of being a girl again; but Marsillac’s spirits revived with
astonishing rapidity. He even seemed to be glad at the idea of his
fellow-scapegrace being merely one of the weaker and gentler sex,
and in her dejection he was for ever seeking to console her. “I love
you ever so much better this way, dear one,” he was constantly
saying. “Ah, Ninon, you are beautiful as an angel!”
But alas! for the approach of Black Monday, and the holidays
ended, Marsillac had to go back to school.
CHAPTER II
Troublesome Huguenots—Madame de L’Enclos—An Escapade, and Nurse

Madeleine—Their Majesties—The Hôtel Bourgogne—The End of the
Adventure—St Vincent de Paul and his Charities—Dying Paternal Counsel—
Ninon’s New Home—Duelling—Richelieu and the Times.
The attack upon La Rochelle, and the incessant Huguenot

disturbances generally, detained Monsieur de L’Enclos almost
entirely away from Ninon, who remained at Loches in the care of her
aunt. From time to time he paid flying visits to Loches—one stay,
however, lasting many months, enforced by a severe wound he had
received. This period he spent in continuing the instruction of his
daughter, on the plan originally mapped out, of fitting her to shine in
society. The course included philosophy, languages, music, with his
special objections to the matrimonial state—engendered, or at least
aggravated by his own failure in the search after happiness along
that path. Far better, undesirable as he held the alternative, to be
wedded to cloistered seclusion than any man’s bride; and well
knowing Ninon’s horror of a nun’s life, he left her to argue out the
rest for herself in her own logical fashion; and there is no doubt that
the whole of her future was influenced by the views he then
inculcated. A modest decorum and sobriety of bearing were indeed
indispensable to good breeding; but carpe diem was the motto of
Monsieur de L’Enclos, as he desired it to be hers; and every
pleasure afforded by this one life, certainly to be called ours, ought to
be enjoyed while it lasted; and unswervingly, to the final page of her
long record, Ninon carried out the comfortable doctrine.
At seventeen years of age, she was perfectly equipped. Beautiful
and highly accomplished, amiable and winning, and though always
well dressed, troubling vastly little over the petty fripperies and
vanities ordinarily engrossing the female mind, she appears to have
gained the commendation and affection of her aunt, who parted from
her with great regret, when the failing health of Madame de L’Enclos
necessitated Ninon’s departure from Loches, to go to Paris, where
the invalid was residing.
Monsieur de L’Enclos fetched Ninon himself from Loches, and in a
day or two she was by her mother’s couch. Madame de L’Enclos
received her with affection, and affectionately Ninon tended her,
going unmurmuringly through the old courses of religious reading
and observance, even to renewing acquaintance with the gouty
canon in Notre-Dame; but the invalid’s chamber was triste and
monotonous, and now and again Ninon effected a few hours’ escape
from it, ostensibly for the purpose of attending Mass or Benediction,
or some service at one or other of the neighbouring churches. One
of them, St Germain l’Auxerrois, was of special interest to Ninon, by
reason of neighbouring the hotel of Madame de la Rochefoucauld;
and she one day interrogated the guardian of the porte cochère, in
the hope of learning some news of Marsillac, whom Time’s chances
and changes had entirely removed from her ken; but whose memory
endured in her heart; for she had been very sincerely attached to
him. The Suisse informing her that he very rarely came to Paris, the
philosophical mind of Ninon soon turned for consolation elsewhere.
On this plea of devout attendance at church, Ninon was freely
permitted leave of absence from the sick room, duennaed by her old
nurse, Madeleine, who, however, frequently permitted herself to be
dropped by the way, at a small house of public entertainment, above
whose door ran the following invitation to step inside:—
“If of dyspepsia you’ve a touch,
Ache of tooth, or head, or such,
There’s nothing like a nip, you see,
Of my delicious Eau de Vie.”
On one of these occasions, her charge went off in the company of

a fairly good-looking and agreeable young gentleman who
addressed her, as she halted for an instant at the corner of the Pont
Neuf, in terms of mingled respect and admiration. Under his escort,
she gathered some conception of the manners and mode of
existence in the gay city, and in the course of their first walk together,
they ran against two of her cavalier’s friends, who were to be
associated intimately with her future—Gondi, the future Cardinal de
Retz, and the young Abbé Scarron—Abbé by courtesy, since he
never went beyond the introductory degree of an ecclesiastical
career. In the company of these three merry companions, she visited
the Hôtel Bourgogne, a place which may be described as answering
more to the music-halls, than to the theatres of the present time. Its
frequenters could dine or sup at its tables, take a turn at tarot or
thimblerig, and enjoy a variety entertainment carried out on lines
mainly popular. It was a vast edifice, built in the Renaissance style,
by Francis I., on the site of the gloomy, fortress-like mansion of Jean
Sans Peur; and for a time it had been devoted to the representation
of the Passion and Mystery plays, and the performances of the
clerks of the Basoche, but grown decadent in these days of Louis
XIII. Ninon obtained on her way a passing glimpse of His Majesty as
he drove by, describing him “as a man of twenty-five; but looking
much older, on account of his morose and taciturn expression,
responding to the acclamations of the people only by a cold and
ceremonious acknowledgment; while Anne of Austria, who followed
in a coach preceded by other carriages, saluted the crowd with
gracious smiles and wavings of her white hand.”
Having partaken of a light collation at one of the tables, the party
gave attention for a while to the actors on the stage, whose
performances were coarse, and not much to Ninon’s taste. Then
Gondi and Scarron took leave of the two, and the sequel of the
adventure proved a warning to young women endowed with any
measure of self-respect, to refrain from making acquaintance with
gallants in the street. Fortunately she escaped the too ardent
attentions of the man, through the intervention and protection of one
of more delicacy and honour. Though this one was quickly equally
enthralled, he went about his wooing of the beautiful girl in more
circumspect fashion, a wooing nipped in the bud by his death from a
wound received a short time later.
In the sombre calm of the invalid’s room stands out the grand
figure of St Vincent de Paul, bringing to her, as to all the afflicted and
heavy-laden, the message of Divine love and pity, and impressing
Ninon with a lasting memory of reverence for the serene, pure face
and gentle utterances of a heart filled with devotion for the Master he
served. Never weary in well-doing, seeming ever to see God, his life
was one long self-sacrifice and work of charity. Moved to such
compassion for the poor convict of the galleys, who wept for the
thought of his wife and children, that the good priest took the fetters
from the man’s limbs, and bidding him go free and sin no more,
wound them upon his own wrists: a heart so thrilled with love and
sorrow for the lot of the miserable little forsaken children of the great
city, that he did not rest till he had effected the reforms so sorely-
needed for their protection.
Hitherto the small waifs and strays had been under the
superintendence of the Archbishop of Paris. The charge of them
was, however, delegated to venal nurses, who would frequently sell
them for twenty sous each. On fête and red-letter days, it had for
long been a custom to expose the little creatures on huge bedsteads
chained to the pavement of Notre-Dame, in order to excite the pity of
the people, and draw money for their maintenance. St Vincent de
Paul was stirred to the endeavour of putting a stop to these
scandals; and instituted a hospital for the foundlings. It was situated
by the Gate of St Victor, and the work of it was carried on by
charitable ladies. The Hospital of Jesus, for eighty poor old men, was
another of his good works; while he ministered to the lunatics of the
Salpétrière, and to the lepers of St Lazare, within whose church
walls he was laid to rest when at last he rendered up his life to the
Master he had served; until the all-destroying Terror disturbed his
remains: but “his works do follow him.” His compassion alone for the
little ones will keep his memory green for all time.
Kneeling at his feet, at her mother’s bidding, the good priest bade
Ninon rise, saying that to God alone the knee should be bent. Then
he laid his hand on her head, calling down a benediction on her, and
praying that she should be protected from the temptations of a sinful
world. His words thrilled her powerfully for the time being. She felt
moved to pour out all her heart to him, but “Satan,” she says, “held
me fast, and would not let me approach God,” and the spell of the
saintly man’s influence passed with his presence.
A few days later, Madame de L’Enclos died, calmly, and tended by
her husband and her child, leaving at least affectionate respect for
her memory. A year later, Monsieur de L’Enclos died. True to the last
to his rule of life, the dying words he addressed to his daughter were
these—
“My child, you see that all that remains to me in these last
moments, is but the sad memory of pleasures that are past; I have
possessed them but for a little while, and that is the one complaint I
have to make of Nature. But alas! how useless are my regrets! You,
my daughter, who will doubtless survive me for so many years, profit
as quickly as you may of the precious time, and be ever less
scrupulous in the number of your pleasures, than in your choice of
them.”
The fortune of Mademoiselle de L’Enclos had been greatly
diminished by the reckless extravagances of her father; and
conscious, probably, of this error in himself, he was careful to protect
her best interests, by purchasing for her an annuity which brought
her 8,000 livres annual income. His prodigality was, however, one of
the few of his characteristics she did not inherit. On the contrary, she
displayed through life a conspicuous power of regulating the
business sides of it with a prudence which enabled her to be
generous to her friends in need, while not stinting herself, or the
ordering of her households, and the entertainment of the company
she delighted in; for the réunions and evenings of Mademoiselle de
L’Enclos were a proverb for all that was at once charming and
intellectual; varied as they were with sweet music, to which her own
singing contributed—more notably still, by her performances on the
lute, which were so skilful; though by these hangs the complaint that
she ordinarily needed a great deal of pressing before she would
indulge the company—a curious exception to the ruling of the ways
of Ninon, ordinarily so entirely innocent of affectation.
At this time her beauty and accomplishments, united with her
fortune, drew many suitors for her hand, and of these there would
probably have been many more, but for the certainty she made no
secret of, that marriage was not in the picture of the life she had
sketched out for herself. Her passion for liberty of thought and action
in every aspect, fostered ever by her father, was dominant in her,
and not to be sacrificed for the most brilliant matrimonial yoke.
One of her first proceedings was the establishment of a home for
herself. It consisted of a handsome suite of rooms in the rue des
Tournelles, in the quarter of the Marais, then one of the most
fashionable in Paris, and distinguished for the many intellectual and
gifted men and women congregating in the stately, red-bricked, lofty-
roofed houses surrounding the planted space in whose centre, a little
later, was to stand the equestrian statue of Louis XIII. The square
had been planned by Mansard, and Ninon’s home—Number 23—
had been occupied by the famous architect himself.
A few doors off was the residence of Cardinal Richelieu, and
within the convenient distance of a few houses—Number 6—lived
Marion Delorme. For years this Place Royale, as it is now called—at
one time Place des Vosges—had been, until Mansard transformed it,
held an accursed spot, and let go to ruin; for here it was stood the
palace of the Tournelles, a favourite residence of Henri II., and in its
courtyard took place the fatal encounter between him and the
Englishman Montgomery, whose lance pierced through the king’s
eye, to his brain, and caused his death. Catherine de Médicis, in her
grief and indignation at the tragic ending of that day’s tilt, caused the
palace to be razed to the ground; but the old associations clung to
the place, for it became the favourite spot for the countless duels
which the young bloods and others were constantly engaging in; until
Richelieu put an almost entire stop to them by his revival of the
summary law against the practice, whose penalty was death by
decapitation. The great cardinal’s ruling was not to be evaded, and
several men of rank suffered death upon the scaffold for disobeying
it.
Away beyond the St Antoine Gate at Picpus, Ninon established
another dwelling for herself, in which it was her custom to rusticate
during the autumn.
Beautiful—though in features not faultlessly so—she bore some
resemblance to Anne of Austria, the adored of Buckingham, a
likeness close enough to admit of the success of a freak played
years later, when she contrived to deceive Louis the Great into the
notion that the shade of his mother appeared to him, to chide him for
certain evil ways. Her nose, like the queen’s, was large, and her
beautiful teeth gleamed through lips somewhat full in their curves;
her hair was dark and luxuriant, while her intelligent and sympathetic
eyes expressed an indescribable mingling of reserve and voluptuous
languor, magnetising all, coupled as it was with the charm of her
gentle, courteous manner and conversation that sparkled with the wit
and sentiment of a mind enriched by careful training and study of the
literature of her own time, and of the past. It was her crowning grace
that she made no display of these really sterling acquirements, and
entertained a wholesome detestation of the pedantry and précieuse
taint of the learned ladies mocked at so mercilessly by that dear
friend of hers, Molière. Few could boast a complexion so delicately
fresh as hers. She stands sponsor to this day to toilette powders and
cosmetics. Bloom and poudre de Ninon boxes find place on
countless women’s dressing-tables to this hour; but in her own case
art rendered little assistance, possibly none at all; except for one
recipe she employed daily through her life. The secret of it,
sufficiently transparent, was equally in the possession of the
beautiful Diana of Poitiers, who also retained her beauty for such a
length of years.
For all who list to read, her letter-writing powers stand perpetuated
in her published correspondence, and while the theme is almost
unvarying—the philosophy of love and friendship—her wit and fancy
treat it in a thousand graceful ways. Fickle as she was in love, she
was constant in friendship, and the heat of the first, often so
startlingly transient, frequently settled down into life-long
camaraderie rarely destroyed. While not ungenerous to her rivals in
the tender passion, she could be dangerously jealous; but gifted with
the saving grace of humour, of which women are said to be destitute,
the anger and malice were oftentimes allowed to die down into
forgiveness, and perhaps also, forgetfulness. Rearing and
temperament set Ninon de L’Enclos apart; even among those many
notable women whose intimate she was. Essentially a product of her
century, she lived her own life in its fulness. Following ever her
father’s counsel, she was at once as boundlessly unrestricted in her
observance of that perfect law of liberty to which she yielded
obedience, as she was scrupulous in selection. Says Monsieur de St
Evrémond of her—“Kindly and indulgent Nature has moulded the
soul of Ninon from the voluptuousness of Epicurus and the virtue of
Cato.”
And at last, after an interval of six years, Ninon and Marsillac met
again. It was in the salon of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Mademoiselle
de L’Enclos, beautiful, sought after, already the centre of an admiring
circle, the talk of Paris, and Monsieur le Capitaine de la
Rochefoucauld, already for two or three years a gallant soldier,
chivalrous, romantic, handsome with the beauty of intellect,
interesting from his air of gentle, cynical pensiveness, ardent in the
cause of the queen so mercilessly persecuted by Richelieu, and
therefore lacking the advancement his qualities merited, still,
however, finding opportunity to indulge in the gallantries of the
society he so adorned. Someone has said that few ever less
practically recognised the doctrines of Monsieur de la
Rochefoucauld’s maxims, than did Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld
himself, and the aphorisms have been criticised, and exception has
again and again been taken to them, not perhaps altogether
unreasonably; but in any case he justified himself of his dictum that
“love is the smallest part of gallantry”; for when at last—and it took
some time—Marsillac recognised his old scapegrace chum of the
Loches château, homage and admiration he yielded her indeed; but
it was far from undivided, and shared in conspicuously by her rival,
Marion Delorme, a woman of very different mould from Ninon. Like
her, beautiful exceedingly, but more impulsive, softer-natured, more
easily apt to give herself away and to regret later on. Intellectually
greatly Ninon’s inferior, she was yet often a thorn in the side of the
jealous Mademoiselle de L’Enclos.
ARMAND JEAN DU PLESSIS
Cardinal Duc de Richelieu
Né à Paris le 5e 7bre 1585. Mort le 4 Décembre 1642.
Paris chez Odieuvre Md d’Estampes Quai de l’Ecole
vis à vis la Samarite à la belle Image; C.P.R.
To face page 24.
The times, as a great commentator has defined them, were indeed

peculiar. The air, full of intrigue, was maintained by Richelieu at
fever-heat, and wheel worked fast and furiously within wheel. There
was the king’s party, though the king was little of it, or in it. The iron
hand of the Cardinal Prime-Minister was upon the helm. Richelieu,
who never stayed in resistance to the encroaching efforts of Spain—
in his policy of crushing the feudal strength of the nobility of the
provinces—or in annihilating Huguenot power as a political element
in the State—saw in every man and woman not his violent partisan,
an enemy to France and to the Crown. How far he was justified, how
far he could have demanded “Is there not a cause?” stands an open
question; but the effect was terrible. The relentless hounding down of
the suspected, forms a page of history stained with the blood of
noble and gallant men. Richelieu’s crafty playing with his marked
victims, chills the soul. They were as ninepins in his hands, lured to
their destruction, sprung upon, crushed often when most they
believed themselves secure.
Sending de Thou to the scaffold for his supposed complicity in the
crime Richelieu fixed on Cinq-Mars, the handsome, insouciant,
brilliant young fellow he had himself provided for the king’s
amusement, and when the time was ripe, having done him to death
by the Lyons headsman upon a superficially-based accusation.
Richelieu was dying then. The consciousness of Death’s hand upon
his harassed, worn-out frame was fully with him; but no pity was in
his heart for Cinq-Mars. It might have been the old rankling jealousy
that urged him on, for the stern, inflexible Armand de Richelieu was
a poor, weak tool of a creature where women were concerned.
“There is no such word as fail,” he was wont to say; yet in his
relations with women, and in his gallantries he failed egregiously. No
fear of him held back Marion Delorme from the arms of Cinq-Mars,
when she yielded to his persuasions to fly with him; and self-love
must have been bitterly wounded, when Anne of Austria laughed his
advances to scorn. Richelieu was not a lady’s man. Nature had
given him a brain rarely equalled, a stupendous capacity and
penetration, but she had neglected him personally—meagre, sharp-
featured, cadaverous, scantily furnished as to beard and moustache,
and lean as to those red-stockinged legs. True, or the mere fruit of
cruel scandal, that saraband pas seul he was said to have been
duped into performing for the delectation of the queen, will hang ever
by the memory of the great Lord Cardinal.
CHAPTER III
A Life-long Friend—St Evrémond’s Courtly Mot—Rabelais v. Petronius—Society

and the Salons—The Golden Days—The Man in Black.
Scarcely was acquaintance renewed with her still quite youthful old
friend, Monsieur de la Rochefoucauld, than Ninon met for the first
time St Evrémond—Charles de St Denys, born 1613, at St Denys le
Guast near Coutances in Normandy—the man with whom her name
is so indissolubly connected, traversing nearly all the decades of the
seventeenth century into the early years of the eighteenth, his span
of life about equalling her own, and though for half of it absent from
her and from his country, maintaining the links of their intimacy in
their world-famed correspondence.
Like Ninon’s, his individuality was exceptional. A born wit, for even
in his childhood, the soubriquet of “Esprit” was bestowed upon him,
his three brothers being severally styled—“The Honest Man,” “The
Soldier,” and “The Abbé.” Charles de St Evrémond was distinguished
by a brilliant and singularly amiable intelligence. As a man of letters
he was rarely gifted; though he evaded, more than sought, the
celebrity attaching to the profession of literature, writing only, it may
be truly said of him—
“... in numbers
For the numbers came.”
He never put forward his own works for publication, and it was only
towards the close of his life that his consent was obtained for such
publication. During his lifetime, many of his pieces in prose and in
verse were printed and circulated in Paris and in London, where, at
the Courts of Charles II. and of William III., forty years of his life were
spent; but these were pirated productions, surreptitiously issued by
his “friends,” to whom he occasionally confided his compositions,
and they, for their own gain, sold them to the booksellers, who
eagerly sought them. These pieces were altogether unfaithful to their
originals, being altered to suit the particular sentiments of readers,
and added to, in order to increase the bulk of the volumes. The style
of St Evrémond’s writings has been the subject of encomium and
warm appreciation from numerous learned critics and litterateurs,
notably St Beuve and Dryden.
One contemporary editor, withholding his name, content with
styling himself merely “A Person of Honour,” has, at all events,
yielded due homage to St Evrémond’s character and genius.
Commenting on the essays which have come within his ken, he
writes—
“Their fineness of expression, delicacy of thought are united with the

ease of a gentleman, the exactness of a scholar, and the good sense of
a man of business. It is certain,” he adds, “that the author is thoroughly
acquainted with the world, and has conversed with the best sort of men
to be found in it.”
To this may be added the praise of Dryden—
“There is not only a justness in his conceptions, which is the foundation

of good writing, but also a purity of language, and a beautiful turn of
words, so little understood by modern writers.”
Agreeable, witty, an excellent conversationalist, and of real

amiability of character and disposition, St Evrémond’s aim in life was
to enjoy it. Indolently inclined, he accepted the ills and contrarieties
of existence, finding even in them some soul of good. Always fond of
animals, he surrounded himself in later years with cats and dogs,
holding them eminently sympathetic and amusing; and he was wont
to say that in order to divert the uneasinesses of old age, it was
desirable to have before one’s eyes something alive and animated.
He possessed enough money for comfortable maintenance from
several sources. Both Charles II. and William III. settled
“gratifications” on him. His creed was a formless one, but he was no
atheist, for all the charge of it laid to him. He was, on the contrary,
quick to rebuke the profanity and laxity of mockers. He himself sums
up his religion in these lines—
“Justice and Charity supply the place
Of rigid penance and a formal face.
His piety without inflicted pains
Flows easy, and austerity disdains.
God only is the object of his care,
Whose goodness leaves no room for black despair.
Within the bosom of His providence
He places his repose, his bliss and sure defence.”
His writings were voluminous, flowing from his pen as a labour he

delighted in. Their themes were varied, brought from the rich stores
of his mind, his most enduring and favourite subjects being classical
Latin lore, and the drama of his own day, lustrous with great names
in France, as in the country of his adoption.
Such, and much more, was St Evrémond the man of letters, and
besides, he was a skilful and gallant soldier, distinguished for his
brilliant sword-play, when he entered upon the exercises preparatory
for his military career. In that capacity he won the approval and
friendship of the Duke d’Enghien, fighting by the prince’s side at
Rocroi and Nordlingen; though later a breach occurred in their
relations, when St Evrémond indulged in some raillery at his
expense. The great man vastly enjoyed persiflage of the sort where
the shafts were levelled at others; but he brooked none of them
aimed at himself, and St Evrémond was deprived of his lieutenancy.
Sometimes the wit carried a more flattering note, and once when
disgrace shadowed him at Court for having appeared in the Sun-
King’s presence in a pourpoint of a fashion not quite up to latest
date, he said to His Majesty—“Sire, away from you, one is not
merely unhappy: one also becomes ridiculous.” The conceit wiped
away St Evrémond’s disfavour. He was a friend of several of the
other renowned soldiers of his time, Turenne among them. It was
one of Condé’s great delights to be read to by St Evrémond. The
duke took pleasure in the lighter classics. Petronius had its
attractions for him, as it had for the society generally of the time; but
he would have none of Rabelais, finding the grossness of the Curé
of Meudon intensely distasteful, and refusing to listen to the
adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel and Grandgousier, and all
their tribe, he insisted on the book being thrown aside. The merry
romances of Petronius, or, at least, attributed to that “Elegantiæ
Arbiter” of a pagan court, while ill adapted as milk for babes, as
perhaps even for the more advanced in years, were not soiled with
the lowermost grossness of the Christian man’s pen, and they were
not without appeal to the students of the classic literature opened up
by the Renaissance, even as the milder licence of Boccaccio
charmed.
Truly, if the times were peculiar, it cannot be said of them that they
were stagnant; and in movement and activity, the present century
bears them some sort of comparison; though beyond this the parallel
fails, to the winning of the days of Ninon. Autres temps, autres
mœurs, and while there may be more veneer of morality in these
present years of grace than then, the question remains whether the
sense of it is deeper and more widely observed. It is one, however,
outside the limits of these pages. Only that the aroma and delicacy
of educated social intercourse do not permeate society as in that
time is undoubted. Of course the impression existing in some minds
of the widespread canker of profligacy and licentiousness then
openly prevailing, is perverting of facts, since punctilio and the Court
etiquette of the most punctilious of monarchs would not, and could
not, have countenanced it. Such licence was indulged in by, and
confined, as it is now, to a certain section of the “smart” community,
and this possibly no such narrow one; but at least it was veiled then
by certain elements of good taste, and some womanly graces now
far to seek. Not then, as now, the motor craze made existence uglier;
then as not now, the bold, inane stares and painted faces of many of
the gentler sex frequenting the highways and byways, were mostly
screened by masks, and an awkward gait was mantled. Some
cultivation of expression, and a little more sense, if not wit, graced

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Textbook Human Rights in Child Protection Implications For Professional Practice and Policy Asgeir Falch Eriksen Ebook All Chapter PDF

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Human Rights in Child Protection:

Implications for Professional Practice

Child Rights Education for Inclusion and Protection

Energy Demand Challenges in Europe Implications for

Safeguarding and Child Protection Linking Theory and

EU Personal Data Protection in Policy and Practice Bart

Sexuality, Human Rights, And Public Policy Chima J.

School Peer Review for Educational Improvement and

Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice Sandra

New Technologies For Human Rights Law And Practice 1st

ISBN 978-3-319-94799-0 ISBN 978-3-319-94800-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018953042

Cover illustration: Matt Caisley via the Noun Project

Next year will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the UN Convention on

Oslo, Norway Asgeir Falch-Eriksen

1 Child Protection and Human Rights: A Call

2 Children’s Right to Protection Under the CRC 15

3 Rights and Professional Practice: How to Understand

4 The Child’s Best Interest Principle across Child Protection

5 Re-designing Organizations to Facilitate Rights-Based

6 Experts by Experience Infusing Professional Practices

7 The Rights of Children Placed in Out-of-­Home Care 129

8 Emergency Placements: Human Rights Limits

9 Rights-Based Practice and Marginalized Children

10 In-home Services: A Rights-Based Professional Practice

11 Embodied Care Practices and the Realization of the Best

12 Formal and Everyday Participation in Foster Families:

13 Conclusion: Towards Rights-Based Child Protection

Asgeir Falch-Eriksen is a researcher at NOVA/Oslo Metropolitan University.

Graham Clifford is Professor Emeritus of Social Work at the Department of

CASS The Consolidation Act on Social Services 2017 (Denmark)

Picture 5.1 My three houses—photos in a series 96

A. Falch-Eriksen (*) • E. Backe-Hansen

© The Author(s) 2018 1

tral tool in the democratic chain of command in the efforts of legislators

2 The Aim and Scope of the Book

services; what interventions are allowed, their frequency, and what

3 ‘Lady Justice’ at Street Level

confronts the modern nation-state on which its citizens depends.

4 Child Protection and Discretion

A delegation of authority to street level implies that case-workers must

5 Human Rights and the Right

underpinned by the principle stipulating the individual’s equality before

6 Child Protection as a Public

out of the legislator’s need to rely on knowledge-based practice within

content is a prerequisite for rights to be realized. The focus is on the

lever to critically assess whether or not they are operative in professional

when they provide care for children in residential institutions, she

© The Author(s) 2018 15

Troublesome Huguenots—Madame de L’Enclos—An Escapade, and Nurse

The attack upon La Rochelle, and the incessant Huguenot

On one of these occasions, her charge went off in the company of

The times, as a great commentator has defined them, were indeed

A Life-long Friend—St Evrémond’s Courtly Mot—Rabelais v. Petronius—Society

“Their fineness of expression, delicacy of thought are united with the

To this may be added the praise of Dryden—

“There is not only a justness in his conceptions, which is the foundation

Agreeable, witty, an excellent conversationalist, and of real

His writings were voluminous, flowing from his pen as a labour he

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Oslo, Norway Asgeir Falch-Eriksen

1 Child Protection and Human Rights: A Call

2 Children’s Right to Protection Under the CRC 15

3 Rights and Professional Practice: How to Understand

4 The Child’s Best Interest Principle across Child Protection

5 Re-designing Organizations to Facilitate Rights-Based

6 Experts by Experience Infusing Professional Practices

7 The Rights of Children Placed in Out-of-Home Care 129

8 Emergency Placements: Human Rights Limits

9 Rights-Based Practice and Marginalized Children

10 In-home Services: A Rights-Based Professional Practice

11 Embodied Care Practices and the Realization of the Best

12 Formal and Everyday Participation in Foster Families:

13 Conclusion: Towards Rights-Based Child Protection

Picture 5.1 My three houses—photos in a series 96

2 The Aim and Scope of the Book

3 ‘Lady Justice’ at Street Level

4 Child Protection and Discretion

5 Human Rights and the Right

6 Child Protection as a Public