Embedding children's participation in child protection: the burden of decision making and the potential of complexity theory

Incorporating children's voices into institutional decision making is considered a challenge despite the widespread policy imperative to do so. This paper problematises organisational management approaches that struggle to lead to children's participation in favour of complexity theory. It applies complexity theory to decision making in an Australian child protection system to demonstrate the potential value of a systems approach in normalising child participation. Decision makers indicate that determining child safety is burdensome and as a core process influences their engagement with children. There are three complications evident: the extensive scope and scale of decisions; the gravity of the decisions; and the emotional toll of those decisions. An organisational management approach perceives these complications to be intensified if children's voices are added to the decision-making process and there is a resultant sense of ambivalence around the uptake of children's participation. Currently, child protection systems largely continue to function using traditional organisation management rules of the Newtonian machine model, prioritising efficiency using simplified processes. The practice of including children's voices in decision-making processes is at odds with this model of achieving efficiency. Listening to children is perceived to complexify rather than simplify system functioning by exacerbating the complications inherent in child protection practice. Children's voices are treated as additional information that needs to be incorporated into the system and therefore often rejected based on the idea of ‘complexity reduction’. We aim to illustrate the protection of children as one set of interdependent decisions set out in policy, legislation, practice, and research, thereby constituting one ‘complex adaptive system’ (CAS) of child protection and reflect on components of CASs that promote decision makers to hear and act on children's voices. Complexity theory offers one alternative to ‘complexity reduction’ to achieve system efficiency, namely ‘complexity absorption’. It may help decision makers synthesise children's perspectives into the complications of decision-making processes, rather than reject children's voices. Complexity theory is proposed as an unconventional but growing lens to ease the ambivalence of participation faced by decision makers and honour the lived experience of individual children.