"Det är svårt, det är ju en stor gråzon" - En kvalitativ studie om förskolepersonals syn på anmälningsplikt

In English "It´s difficult, there is a big grey zone”. A qualitative study of preschool teachers’ thoughts on the obligation to report

There are several professionals in Sweden who are obligated by law to report when they suspect a possible case of a child being maltreated. The aim of this study was to capture preschool teachers’ thoughts on what that obligation means. How does it work in the field? Does personality matter when it comes to preschool teachers’ reporting to the social service? Are there factors that may affect preschool teachers’ to report to the social service? What is the collaboration between preschool and social services? We conducted seven interviews with three preschool teachers’ who are employed at two different municipal preschools in the south of Sweden. The other four interviews were with preschool teachers’ from two private preschools in the same area. The interviews were semi – structured and other than those interviews we used two typical case vignettes with the aim of getting the preschool teachers’ to reflect whether they would report the cases to the social service or not. The aim of these two vignettes was also to capture the complexity of the obligation and the term “child maltreatment”. Or is it really complex? We used two theories to acknowledge why preschool teachers’ act the way they do. Those two were the theory of ethics, divided into normative ethics and the ethics of consequences, and the structural theory which is a theory of organizations. This study shows that there are a variety of reasons why preschool teachers’ sometimes finds it difficult to report. These are fear of the report being wrong, ignorance, lack of routines and a not functional collaboration between the preschool and the social service.