Social workers often lack formal training in sexual health issues, both in terms of their academic education and through knowledge-enhancing initiatives in practice. This lack of knowledge is noteworthy, given that child welfare services frequently work with young people who are particularly vulnerable in terms of sexual health, such as those with problematic substance use. The purpose of this study is to investigate how child welfare assessments of young people with substance use problems relate to issues of sexual health. A total of 15 semistructured interviews were conducted with investigating child welfare workers and front-line managers, which serve as the foundation for two academic papers.

The first paper focused on how sexual health issues were understood and managed within child welfare investigations, concluding that sexual health was not regarded as a distinct area of knowledge. Instead, child welfare workers viewed sexual health issues as part of other established domains, such as problematic substance use, gender-based violence, or delinquency. Consequently, issues interpreted as more explicit sex-related issues were not seen as the responsibility of the child welfare system, but were primarily referred to healthcare professionals.

The second paper examined how youths’ gender, sexual orientation, and sexual health related to issues of sexual health through the child welfare investigation process. The results shows that the child welfare services adopt a relatively narrow as well as heteronormative approach to sexual health and sexuality; girls were seen as potential victims of sexual assault, while boys were viewed as perpetrators of sexual violence. Young LGBTQ individuals, however, were often unseen due to their nonconformity to traditional gender norms that usually characterize the assessment work of the child welfare services.

Together, the two papers highlights how the child welfare services lacks a structure to develop and utilize in-depth knowledge in the field of sexual health. This was particularly evident in how the sexual health of young people often became an issue for individual social workers who were personally interested and/or committed to supporting young people in these matters, rather than seeing the organization as a whole as responsible for supporting young people’s personal conditions necessary for good sexual health.