Prevention of child endangerment in deportation processes in Germany : Understanding the processes from a street-level bureaucrats' perspective

Abstract: The aim of this qualitative study is to understand the processes around the prevention of child endangerment in deportation processes in Germany focusing on street-level bureaucrats. Eight social welfare professionals directly working with refugee minors and having experiences with deportation processes where refugee minors are or were involved distributed along three Federal States participated in this study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted online and were analysed afterwards by using discourse analysis. Strong engagement, emotional involvement, frustration, and anger but also objective views and uncertainty when it comes to the prevention of child endangerment in deportation processes emerged. The deportation process is viewed as something very horrible and not compatible with the best interests of the child leading to cases of child endangerment. Responsibility for this was attributed to the system/state, street-level bureaucrats, as well as parents. Prevention of child endangerment in this context is seen as very difficult as there appear to be barriers at different levels where improvement is needed, containing a professional and personal level, the parental level, and a political and state level. The results were discussed then by using the concept of institutional logics and Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucracy. The street-level bureaucrats’ reasoning and practice are informed by several institutional logics which are interpreted and valued differently and raise conflicts which need to be solved. The human rights logics and national state logics, as well as logics of professionalism and logics of bureaucracy play an important role in this context.