"The children have pretty much influence, but I can’t say in what exactly" : Accommodation – staff’s experiences of unaccompanied children’s influence at residential care homes

During the last years the numbers of unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Sweden have increased rapidly. Most of these children are placed in residential care homes. Although influence is a right for the children, many studies show that their influence lacks at residential care homes. Previous studies have also shown that social workers were aware of the importance of children’s influence but the problem was that they didn’t have any methods to make it work in practice. Further there are other studies that present methods in working with children’s influence. Client- focused work and actively listening to the children are two methods among others that studies has shown are important when working with influence. At the same time it has shown that the conditions at residential care homes are not satisfying for working with children’s influence. We therefore wanted to study the accommodation- staffs’ experiences of children’s influence at residential care homes. 8 accommodation- staffs’ were interviewed in various residential care homes in a county in southern Sweden. We found that, based on the staffs reasoning, there is a lack of influence among the children at residential care homes. The accommodation- staffs’ experiences however seemed to be based on the lack of sufficiently good methods and conditions at the residential care homes, which also confirmed previous studies