Udsat til børneforsorg: om etablering af familiepleje, børenanstalter og indsats i hjemmet for udsatte børn i Danmark

This dissertation looks into the treatment of exposed children and young people. The background is a puzzlement as to how the discourse on treatment, during the latest twenty years, has concentrated on the same institutions and themes (Ebsen, 2007). The aim of the dissertation is to shed light on how the institutions of child saving, (family care, placement in residential care, intervention in the home) the specific social technologies and the understanding of children and adolescents, within the child saving system, were established.
The first step in this research was to look back in time through the legislation and realize that the first stand-alone act on exposed children and adolescents was launched in 1905 (The Act of neglected and Criminal Children and Adolescents). The Act states that the institutions of child saving include family care, small and large institutions, special intervention in the homes of the neglected children, and an agency which was to make decisions on removing a child and, if necessary, on where the child should be placed.
It appears as if the institutions had already been established at the time, and were just gathered in one act. The act gathered the many organizations into a public unity of child saving with the crucial point of securing a public financing by the state. There are good reasons for regarding the 1905 Act as a kind of constitution of the Danish child saving (Like e.g. Egelund, 1997; Bryderup, 2008).
This led to research into the background of the 1905 Act More specifically, it led to the study of how the various institutions mentioned in the Act had come into being, and it was examined whether there existed some kind of special institutional “lock-up” which meant that one century later the same institutions were still crucial.