Child Welfare in Vienna 1925-1997

The scope of the following research project is the Viennese child welfare organisation between 1925 and 1997 as means and expression of family policy, population policy and social policy and their ideological, political and economic frames and implications. The aim is to highlight continuity and ruptures in the theory and practise of Viennas welfare system across the borders of different ideologies and systems during the period in question. What reformulation of theories and what changes in actual practise took place during this period, but also which theoretical positions and which practise were kept on in spite of a change of regime? Can communal child welfare be described as a more or less self-regulatory social system? One multifunctional institution forms a central core within this system: the Kinderübernahmsstelle (KÜST). From its foundation in 1925 up until the mid 1990s this institution co-ordinated welfare dealings within children and juveniles, their families of origin., foster families, placement in childrens homes etc. The KÜST kept its central position up until the "Childrens Home Reform 2000", when the City of Viennas large childrens homes were replaced by decentralised flats for small groups of children and their carers. The end of this era marks a good point for a historic-social-scientific investigation of Viennas welfare system and its central institution the KÜST. The study is to take place on four different levels, each of which require different methods of research: Theory and discourse (1), practise of child welfare (2), opposition between child welfare and its clients (3), child welfare in its political context (4). The first step is an extensive study of relevant primary and secondary sources and literature. Next a number of exemplary case studies is to be reconstructed in detail using archive material. These are to be typical "welfare-cases", where all the families members can be seen as part of a "problem-system" both from their own point of view, as well as from the professional view of the welfare system. A number of (narrative) interviews with selected professionals and clients will take place. This linking of data from the KÜSTs archives with narratives by members of families under welfare care (triangulation) will enable us to view a number of "welfare cases" in great detail, complexity and specificity and thus interpret them in view of our basis research interest.

The object of this completed research project is Vienna child-welfare provision between 1925 and 1997 as the expression and means of family, demographic and social policy in its ideo-logical, political and economic general conditions and effects. A multifunctional institution forms the organisational core of this system: the Kinderübernahmsstelle (KÜST). From its foundation in 1925 until the mid-1990s, as a "transit and expert-opinion office" this agency coordinated the care provision in relation to children and young people, their original families, foster families, residential care and adoption etc. Altogether it should be noted that, for the whole period of the study, changes and continuities frequently run parallel to each other and that the politico-historical caesuras correspond to inner-institutional (agency internal) caesu-ras (determined by generation and gender-role conflicts) of the history of the municipal child welfare institutions. New ideas, largely suggested by internal experts, only slowly gain accep-tance and are belatedly reflected in the administration and legal structure. The study con-firms the pronounced continuity of the system of child welfare (structurally, administratively, ideologically and methodically), covering the years of the First Republic, the years from 1938 to 1945 and the post-war period reaching up to the 1960s. Thus, eugenic, medicinal welfare concepts of child welfare characterised both the 1920s and period of the corporate state up until after the Second World War. The period of Nazi rule in Austria, despite the participation of welfare agencies in "selection" and "weeding out" activities, represented no break with re-gard to the theory and practice of child welfare. After the transfer of the "expert-opinion of-fice" to the Vienna City Child Welfare Institute Am Spiegelgrund in 1940, the KÜST, too, con-tinued to function as the central dealing- agency. Owing to the limited extent of denazification, there are no grounds for the assertion of a "year zero" in the post-war period, either in rela-tion to the personnel or to the ideological-practical orientation of child welfare. Only in the course of the development of the welfare state in the framework of an economic boom did the generation of experts who were newly coming into the child agency in the 1960s and 1970s provide a decisive impetus for "modernisation". Thus socio- and depth-psychological concepts of various schools gained acceptance in the theory and practice of welfare activi-ties. In the course of the development of new methods of children-placement out of famlily (the first community housing and the development of socio-pedagogical homes) and a pro-fessionalisation of the experts, the function of the KÜST changed and its original central im-portance in the whole system of child welfare steadily declined. Long resistant to changed ideological-methodological concepts and societal demands, as a result of the first reform of children`s homes (decentralisation of the large homes), in the 1970s the KÜST lost its func-tion as the central "turntable" in the dealing-system. The closure of the KÜST in the frame-work of the 2000 children`s home reform (closure of all large homes) thereby marked a para-digm shift in welfare provision analogous to the erection of the KÜST in 1925 as a symbol of the installation of public statutory child welfare provision, in each case under the premise of the statutory duty of "protection of the child". As a result of its application-oriented approach, the research project has made a decisive contribution to a networking with child-welfare experts and institutions (MA11: Agency for Young People and the Family in Vienna; the Vienna "Campus" University, Faculty for Social Work) both in the field of practice (teaching) and in the field of academic and methodological research.