Trust and Legal Certainty in Preventive Social-Service Interventions: for sustainable social services

Swedish social services face growing expectations to strengthen early, voluntary, and preventive interventions while ensuring equal treatment and public trust. At the same time, restrictive migration policies and intensified child-protection practices increasingly intersect, placing migrant families—particularly mothers—at the junction of support and scrutiny. These developments create an urgent need for research that clarifies how preventive social work can safeguard children while avoiding disproportionate interventions and reinforcing institutional trust and legitimacy. The project addresses how fragile trust, cultural misinterpretations, and discretionary judgments can undermine preventive ambitions and produce avoidable harm. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for building a welfare system that families can engage with and for ensuring that preventive measures are experienced as fair, transparent, and supportive.