Who Is Responsible for the Child? Institutional Betrayal and the Responsibilisation of Children, Families and Frontline Professionals in Turkey

Abstract

Child welfare and safety depend on a chain of actors: parents and carers, families, communities, frontline professionals and the state. When responsibility is unevenly distributed across this chain, accountability for children erodes even where formal legal protection remains. In Turkey, this erosion is acute: the country has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child but operates a thin welfare architecture in which state obligations are routinely discharged downward This paper examines how this downward transfer of responsibility operates in Turkey. Drawing on institutional betrayal theory (Smith and Freyd 2014) and Beck's (1992) concept of organised irresponsibility, we identify three mechanisms by which welfare for children is hollowed out without any single institution being held to account: responsibilisation of the child, responsibilisation of the family and responsibilisation of the frontline professional. This is a conceptually driven case analysis. We examined Turkish official statistics (TÜİK 2023, 2024), United Nations instruments and indices (UNCRC, UNICEF Türkiye, UNDP), reports by Turkish civil society organisations and unions (Çocuk Vakfı, Sosyal‐İş Sendikası, IMDAT, Türkiye Okul Yemeği Koalisyonu, TİHEK, TÜKD Antalya) and media‐reported cases for the period 2014 to 2025. Sources were thematically coded against the three mechanisms. We identify three mechanisms through which responsibility for safeguarding is shifted away from institutions and redistributed onto those with the least power. Each mechanism transfers an obligation that legally and structurally belongs to the state onto an actor with less capacity to discharge it. The child is reframed as morally complicit in her own victimisation. The family is held accountable for managing structural risk that a retreating welfare state has stopped absorbing. The frontline professional is asked to compensate for thin institutional architecture without commensurate training, supervision or resourcing. The cumulative effect is institutional betrayal of those who depend on the system, sustained by an organised irresponsibility in which every actor can point to another, and no one is answerable. Re‐institutionalising responsibility requires three corrections that map onto the three mechanisms: child protection frameworks that refuse to moralise victimisation; social policy that rebuilds the material conditions for family safeguarding; and sustained investment in the frontline workforce. The Turkish case speaks to international debates on safeguarding under welfare‐state retrenchment.