1. ZHAW digitalcollection
2. Soziale Arbeit
3. Publikationen
4. Publikationen Soziale Arbeit

Publication type:	Conference other
Type of review:	Peer review (abstract)
Title:	How professionals in Swiss foster care deal with religiosity
Authors:	van Oordt, Noëmi
et. al:	No
Conference details:	17th International Conference of the European Scientific Association on Residential & Family Care for Children and Adolescents (EuSARF), Brighton, United Kingdom, 12-15 September 2023
Issue Date:	14-Sep-2023
Language:	English
Subjects:	Foster care; Religion; Professional
Subject (DDC):	200: Religion 362.7: Youth services
Abstract:	For children who cannot grow up with their biological parents, Switzerland, like many other countries, offers the possibility of placement in a state-approved foster family. Foster care professionals from various organizations are responsible for recruiting, assigning, and supervising foster families. The study shows that while foster children come from families with different religious backgrounds and practices, Christian religiosity is widespread among foster families – especially among non-relative foster families. On the one hand, Swiss law stipulates that religious upbringing until the age of 16 is always the responsibility of the parents of origin (Art. 303 ZGB; Gassner 2018). On the other hand, studies state that a trans-religious placement can be accompanied by additional challenges for the children (Werner 2019) or various dilemmas (van Bergen et al. 2022). This additional task is a source of inequality, since it does not have to be performed by foster children who are placed within their religious community or in a foster family with very similar religious practices to those of the family of origin. In my dissertation, I study, how professionals in foster care deal with religiosity in foster families. Following the grounded theory methodology and using a sequence-analytical approach, I work with data collected in the research project "Images of the foster family and their effect on the cooperation processes in foster care", which was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The research is based on nine group discussions with a total of 47 foster care professionals from German and French-speaking Switzerland. In answering open questions about images of the foster family, religion emerged as an important but also sensitive issue in the professionals’ responses. The results so far show that: • Evangelicalism plays an important role in Swiss foster care system. • On a theoretical level, rules for dealing with religiosity are formulated. • In practice, there is no standard procedure, • professionals show a various avoidance policy regarding the enforcement of these rules, and • responsibility for trans-religious placements is delegated to parents of origin or foster children, who may be poorly informed and involved or have simply no choice. This veiling of handling religiosity by professionals leads to social injustice for the most vulnerable actors in foster care: foster children and their parents of origin. Introducing these results may initiate a discussion that will further sharpen the view and yield new insight into dealing with religiosity in social work in and outside of foster care.
Further description:	Presentation within the Invited Symposium "Youth Care in Religious Diverse Societies".
URI:	https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/29071
Fulltext version:	Published version
License (according to publishing contract):	Not specified
Departement:	Social Work
Organisational Unit:	Institute of Childhood, Youth and Family (IKJF)
Published as part of the ZHAW project:	Bilder der Pflegefamilie und ihre Wirkung auf Kooperationsprozesse in der Pflegekinderhilfe
Appears in collections:	Publikationen Soziale Arbeit

Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.