Keeping Families Together: A problem-structuring approach to policy and programming to prevent family separation and orphanage placement in Cambodia.

Abstract

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children (2010) establish a child's right to remain with their parents and ratifying governments’ duty to support families at risk of separation. Despite these standards, global child care policy and programming primarily address children already separated from their families, and the United Nations has observed that many countries lack sufficient preventive family support services. In Cambodia, high rates of family separation and a perceived over-reliance on residential children’s institutions are significant issues, prompting attention to child care reform and deinstitutionalisation.

This study, informed by Hoppe's (2010) problem-structuring and Bacchi's (2009) 'What’s the problem represented to be?' approaches, analyses Cambodian child care reform policies and programmes, as well as accounts from twenty-three Cambodian social workers, twenty NGO managers and twelve family caregivers with lived experience of family separation and the placement of children in residential care. By comparing and contrasting these perspectives, the study builds a contextualised descriptive map of the drivers of family separation in Cambodia, allowing for an informed structuring of the problem.

Social workers and caregivers who participated in this study highlighted ongoing challenges in keeping children living at home, primarily due to livelihood and poverty-related issues, as well as other socioeconomic factors such as migration, over-indebtedness, substance misuse, and ethnic discrimination. Conversely, analysis of child care policy and programming documents revealed an emphasis on globalised policy models influenced by neoliberal values and the child care deinstitutionalisation framework, focusing on the closure of children’s residential care centres and behaviour change approaches targeted at parents and caregivers to reduce violence against children, improve parenting capacity, and counter perceived positive community attitudes towards children’s residential care. These policies pay less attention to household economic strengthening measures to improve family income and mitigate the impacts of structural socioeconomic factors on families.

The findings suggest a disconnect between families' on-the-ground challenges and the current policy and programming focus. The study concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for policy, programming, and practice and proposing the problem- structuring framework as a participatory, reflective, and pragmatic approach for analysing and designing policy and programming to help keep families together.