Safeguarding Children’s Well-Being: The Protection System in Italian Welfare

The mission of child protection in welfare systems has been progressively strengthened in recent decades, becoming a real priority on the social policy agenda at international and national level. In Italy, in the network of stakeholders involved in child protection, the role of the social services is central. These services play a role that is as decisive as it is complex, both because they operate with multi-problematic families, and for the scarcity of resources, shared models, and suggestions on effective methods. Because of the absence of a clear national normative framework in the Italian context, the local protection systems are highly heterogeneous and the relations between the stakeholders are complex. Although the National Guidelines Intervention with children and families in a situation of vulnerability (LIV) approved in 2017 have remarked that the family-supportive approach prevails in the Italian context, the flexibility and generality of national and regional norms ensure a certain discretion in the work of practitioners. This discretionary power, if on the one hand it allows to plan the intervention on the individual case according to its peculiarities, on the other hand it produces very high variability in the practices, at several levels (national, regional, local). The lack of homogeneity of procedures and approaches, moreover, implies a greater complexity of the decision- making process and of the taking charge process, which are inevitably affected by organizational aspects and by the characteristics of the context.