Ethics & Social Welfare

AI in Child and Youth Welfare Services

The use of artificial intelligence in child and youth welfare can help detect risks and provide professionals with valuable information and support in their decision-making process. However, the use of AI also introduces risks, such as potential biases and the problem of "black box" decision-making, where the inner workings of the algorithms are opaque. This makes it essential that professionals understand how these algorithms operate and can be and should be put to work. The use of AI requires clear ethical commitment that ensures trustworthiness and explainability, guaranteeing fairness, transparency, and accountability. Additionally, parents, children and adolescents should be empowered to participate in shaping the decisions that affect them. Beyond mapping the ethical terrain, it is crucial to critically interrogate how AI reshapes power relations between state agencies, service providers, and the families and young people they serve, for example how algorithmic risk scoring can inadvertently reinforce structural inequalities - or conversely, how carefully curated datasets and participatory design can become levers for social justice. For this purpose it is important to combine empirical evidence with normative argument and also to consider intersectional perspectives to illuminate potential for unjustified discrimination and differential impacts across lines of race, gender, disability, migration status, or else.

We welcome contributions that explore these questions from empirical, theoretical, normative, or practice-based perspectives.

Suggested themes include, but are not limited to:

• How can ethical principles be embedded in the development and application of AI in child and youth welfare? In what ways do AI systems reproduce or counter structural inequalities?
• What forms of professional knowledge and responsibility are required when working with AI?
• How can participatory approaches strengthen justice and transparency in data-driven welfare systems?
• What role do race, class, gender, disability or migration status play in shaping the impacts of AI? How do parents, children and young people experience and understand AI-based decisions?
• What does it mean to understand social work as a human rights profession in the age of AI?
• How do social work ethics and AI ethics relate to one another? Where do they converge (e.g. in values like justice or non-discrimination), and where do tensions arise (e.g. between relational ethics and algorithmic logic)?
• What is the specific significance of core AI ethics principles—such as explainability, transparency, fairness, or accountability—when applied in the context of services for children, adolescents, and families?
• How can different ethical frameworks in social work—such as rights-based approaches, ethics of care, justice theory, the capability approach, or principle-based
  ethics—contribute to a more nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of the ethical use of AI in child and youth welfare?
• How do AI-based tools affect professional practice in different areas of child and youth services, such as child protection, open youth work, residential care, or family court proceedings? What ethical challenges emerge in these specific settings?
• What forms of resistance, adaptation or appropriation of AI technologies are visible in frontline practice? How do practitioners negotiate, reinterpret or contest algorithmic systems in everyday decision-making?
• What practical strategies (e.g. training, co-design, advocacy) exist or are needed to support ethical and reflective AI use among social workers and allied professionals?
  How do international contexts shape the use and regulation of AI in child and youth welfare? What lessons can be drawn from comparative perspectives across welfare systems, legal frameworks, data regimes, or cultural understandings of childhood and risk?
• How do differences in policy environments, infrastructure, and resource allocation influence both the promise and the pitfalls of AI implementation in various national or regional contexts?
• How do intercultural and global differences shape understandings of ethical responsibility, child welfare, and technological legitimacy? In what ways might AI systems developed in one cultural or socio-political context clash with local values, norms, or child-rearing practices elsewhere?
• What are the promises and perils of so-called ‘agentic AI’ from an ethics perspective?
• What are the ethical implications of ascribing agency to AI and how do these ascriptions affect our conceptual understanding of terms like ‘autonomy’, ‘agency’, ‘accountability’ etc.?
• What are the ethical challenges of possible applications of agentic AI in child welfare services and what considerations should guide the division of labour between AI and humans? How can human supervision of AI applications in child welfare services be organised adequately, etc.?