Background: Children's right to participation in child welfare decision-making is highlighted in law and research. However, there is a lack of comprehensive empirical research on how such participation is actually fulfilled.Objective: This article aims to describe and analyse the extent, nature and determinants of children's participation in child welfare investigations in Sweden as well as to discuss barriers to participation.Participants and setting: The dataset comprises a cohort of 2123 children investigated during 2022 across eight municipalities in Stockholm County, Sweden.Methods: The study is based on cross-sectional data where the responsible child welfare workers served as informant in a survey focusing child and case factors concerning 2123 children subject to child welfare investigations. The data is analysed by using descriptive and binary logistic regression analyses.Results: In approximately 75 % of the child welfare investigations, child welfare workers held interviews with the child (with or without parental presence) while individual child interviews were carried out in about 50 % of the cases. Multiple interviews (≥3) occurred in 14 % of the cases. Reasons for not interviewing children included finding interviews to be unnecessary, perceiving the child as too young, and reluctance by the child as to participation. Investigations involving older children and referrals related to abuse increased the odds for participation.Conclusions: The study suggests that more children are interviewed by child welfare authorities than found in previous studies, but that there still is a gap between the legislative intention to facilitate child participation and the actual state of child welfare practice.

This chapter discusses recent shifts and contradictions in the Swedish child protection and welfare system in the context of the fight against gang crime which is an increasing problem in Sweden today. The overall question in this chapter is quite simply – what is happening with children’s rights in Sweden in the 2020s? – and the overall aim is to discuss what the legal shift and changes in Sweden can tell us about challenges when it comes to realizing and respecting children’s rights in other contexts and jurisdictions more than 30 years after the entry into force CRC. The focus is on how law reforms in Sweden in the 2020’s may lead to that children’s right being overlooked and risk of discrimination against groups of children affected by and suspected to be involved in gang crime, but also how such discrimination by extension can be seen as non-legitimate differential treatment of (all) children because they are children, i.e., age discrimination. It is discussed how children, in the context of the fight against gang criminality are, on the one hand subjected to what can be labelled ‘adultification’ and ‘over-responsibilization’, making children responsible in the same way as adults, but on the other hand, children are perceived as ‘different’ and therefor in need of more control than adults– being ‘treated like a child’. The hope is that this chapter can broaden the understanding of discrimination against children, both that between different groups of children, and non-legitimate differential treatment of children as a group, i.e. discrimination on the basis of childhood.