David Rodríguez: "The DGAIA has forgotten about prevention and has focused on places in juvenile detention centers."

BarcelonaDavid Rodríguez, recently elected vice-dean of the College of Social Work of Catalonia, warns of the shortcomings of the child protection system and defends a Structural reform of the General Directorate of Child and Adolescent Care (DGAIA) focused on prevention, humanization, and active listening to minors and families.

How are professionals receiving these new winds of change?

— One of our demands is for changes to the curriculum, because none of the professionals involved in the protection system have any specialization in childhood. Not everyone has the capacity or training to properly identify risk indicators. Furthermore, we lack knowledge of other disciplines in routine practice: their families. We share the idea that if anyone should take the reins, it should be the administration, to equip the protection system with criteria such as health.

What are your demands on the Department of Social Rights?

— We talk about a social services system, but in reality it doesn't have the conditions to be called that, because a system entails criteria for prevention, intervention, evaluation, and transfer. We would like to see established waiting times for cases, for professionals to have legal advice to make appropriate proposals for protective measures and for them not to be delayed. We would also like to see a complaint system for families so that they are heard and their opinions taken into account. We also advocate for the implementation of center participation councils, which entails collecting user opinions, and also a continuing education during working hours, as occurs in the health system.

Where and who detects the risk?

— There's a network of basic social services, as well as schools, health centers, and the police. Screening is done based on criteria, and if it's a situation that social services can handle, families are contacted, follow-up is done with schools, etc. When there's a medium or high level of risk, we have a bottleneck because everything stops at a single point of entry: the Child Abuse Detection and Protection Unit (UDEPMI), which refers users to specialized services in the region, such as the care teams (EAIA), to develop work plans for families. Here we should consider whether all social services can provide this follow-up as they should.

Social services report that they are preoccupied with the social emergency.

— Yes, and all of this creates a waiting list, and when an emergency arises, the child is preempted by minor cases. And preempting the waiting list not only means postponing a case, but also a brutal workload, because it involves preparing a report, summoning the family, and embarking on a process that many families don't understand because there isn't time to properly explain what abandonment means or to make them understand that the child will be separated for a while, but that everything possible will be done to resolve the situation.

Are there standardized scales for detecting risks?

— Yes, there is a registry, the Unified Registry of Child Abuse (RUMI), where all the indicators are listed. In this sense, all professionals are aware of them, or should be aware of them. But this is a question the department should be asking.

Has the child protection system forgotten prevention?

— Child protection begins long before and continues long after the centers, and instead, we have focused the system and the DGAIA on residential places. basic social services are understaffed and specialized services—family monitoring or violence detection—that serve as beacons and focus on risk.

Are guardianships withdrawn for being poor or a migrant?

— No, these are not factors leading to the withdrawal of guardianship. However, it is much more likely that in a context of poverty or irregular status, circumstances that could be classified as neglect will eventually arise. And it cannot be that an issue resolved with money and greater prevention ends with the breakup of a family and the removal of the child. It is important to work like a craftsman on the preserved aspects of these families, who have not been able to do better but who love their children. Otherwise, it is impossible because it generates disaffection with the system, distrust of professionals, and in the end, what they do is delegate the parental role.

Less than 20% of children from the centers return home., but how many of the 5,000 admitted could be kept at home?

— We test returns on weekends and overnight stays because the ultimate goal is to ensure children aren't in the system forever. The main objective when someone enters a center is to leave as soon as possible. But perhaps, very likely, some technician from the general management will say that if you're doing two-week tests, they should stay. Perhaps we're interested in seeing if the family responds well to the criteria for order in relation to the internal organization of the home and how they handle it so as not to generate another conflict that escalated until it ended in withdrawal. That's why I think we should look at children and families as additional actors in the solution. We need to build this adherence with families and ensure they trust the professionals.

What went wrong that caused a minor in a center to be raped by adults outside for months?

— It is clear that it is a system errorBut who do we blame? The police, who didn't detect it? The center? It seems the professionals suspected it, and when they checked the girl's phone, they automatically made the referral. But we only talked about that girl and didn't talk about the other 15 who live with their families. Are these families also negligent? What do we do with them?

What could be changed in the centers?

— I believe it's essential for families to enter the center with 30 or 40 cohabitation units for 10 children, as the law itself states. The administrative burden and safeguarding protocols end up making it a slow and cumbersome machine.

But are protocols family rules?

— In the end, they lead to a lack of capacity for innovation and adaptation to specific cases. Imagine a boy who doesn't return to the center. After four hours, the escape protocol will be activated. Sometimes, they go home, and then the family can become embroiled in a problem if they don't report it. I wouldn't be able to say whether that mother loves her son a lot or a little. Perhaps I could say, "Based on the indicator grids, whether he has a protective capacity or not, this boy loves his mother a lot, despite her negligence." Well, we must use this love to work on the bond with the family.