A child’s right to protection during the COVID-19 crisis: An exploratory study of the child protective services of Estonia

In 2019 the novel Coronavirus COVID-19 was discovered, and the following year the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. This pandemic is unprecedented in human history and affects all aspects of life. In this article, we explore the pandemic’s impact on child protective services in Estonia and survey a representative sample of child protection workers (n = 81), asking three open-ended questions designed to explore child protection practice. These questions concern the impact on organisational design, the workers’ ability to conduct a diagnosis of a child’s care context, and what knowledge they could draw upon, as well as the decision itself. The overall findings indicate that the organisational design left practice unprepared; there was a general lack of ability to act upon referrals and also to conduct investigations to evaluate care contexts. Furthermore, there is a general lack of knowledge of how to deal with protective practices and conduct decision-making during crisis situations.