Professionalization By the State – the Case of Child and Adult Protection in Switzerland

In our presentation we want to explain, how in Switzerland the state respectively the government has tried to professionalize the practice in the field of child and adult protection by a law reform in 2013.

We will concentrate on the adult protection and describe first the practice before the law reform. Then we will describe the reasons, intentions and goals of the state in the law reform. In a third part of our presentation we describe the changes in the practice according to the law especially in respect to the professionalization goals. In the last part we discuss the question whether the changes could be interpreted as professionalization and how far the state was successful in his goal. Our presentation presents central findings of a three year research project in the field of adult protection in Switzerland. The aim of the project was to clarifiy how organization and professionals interprete law prescriptions and how they make use of degrees of freedom in creating a practice based on new law prescriptions.