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Child Abuse and State Intervention: The Danish Case Tøndersagen

  • Journal of the Scandinavian Society of Korea
  • Abbr : JSSK
  • 2015, (16), pp.227-254
  • Publisher : The Scandinavian Society of Korea
  • Research Area : Social Science > Area Studies > North Europe(Scandinavian)

Boon Young HAN 1

1한국외국어대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Denmark is commonly known as a welfare state, offering universal benefits to all people living and working within the country. Luckily, most children in Denmark are doing well, but for those who are exposed to abuse, improved knowledge and understanding is essential to provide the best possible services. Therefore, following the critical results from the 2003 UNICEF report, one may wonder how Denmark responded to this discouraging state of child maltreatment. The purpose of this article is to analyze the development of child welfare policies since 2003 in Denmark. To accomplish this, I will discuss the concepts of child abuse, intervention and welfare in general, and key studies from Denmark after the 2003 UNICEF report, in particular. Furthermore, I will use the child abuse case known to locals as Tøndersagen (TheTøndercase), which was discovered in 2005 to illustrate the state’s responsibility to intervene in high-risk families. The framework for child welfare can be characterized as either a child protective orientation or a family welfare orientation in regards to the child abuse reporting system. These two systems differ along four dimensions: 1) Framing child abuse, 2) Operating the response, 3) The function of child welfare professionals and 4) Parents agreement to out-of-homeplacements. Child abuse was medically “discovered” in 1962 when Kempe and his colleagues coined the term the battered child syndrome to describe “a clinical condition in young children who have received serious physical abuse, generally from a parent or a foster parent”. Tøndersagen is an example of the State’s failure to intervene, and the eldest daughter’s successful legal action against the local authorities has proven an important historical change in attitudes towards local authority’s responsibilities towards at-risk and abused children. At a time, when privatization and marketization has become a dominating trend, the compensation is a reminder that quality must be a primary priority when delivering social welfare services.

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