Taking responsibility and creative workarounds: LGBTQ+ affirmative practice in child welfare

Craig, S. L., Pham, V., Hui, J., & Brooks, A. S. (2026). Taking responsibility and creative workarounds: LGBTQ+ affirmative practice in child welfare. Children and Youth Services Review, 188, Article 109135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2026.109135  

Background 

•  LGBTQ+ youth are substantially overrepresented in child-welfare systems and may enter care following experiences including family rejection, abuse, neglect, instability, and other identity-related harms.

• Once involved with child welfare, LGBTQ+ youth can experience further identity invalidation, unsafe placements, discrimination, concealment pressure, and inconsistent access to affirming adults.

• LGBTQ+ affirmative practice intentionally validates youths' identities, relationships, and lived experiences while actively countering stigma and discrimination.

• Child-welfare professionals can therefore be important sources of safety and affirmation, but existing systems do not consistently translate affirmative principles into routine practice.

• Previous scholarship has concentrated more heavily on LGBTQ+ youths' experiences and provider attitudes than on the specific behaviors through which child-welfare professionals actually enact affirmative practice.

• This study asked how child-welfare professionals conceptualize and enact LGBTQ+ affirmative practice in everyday work and how organizational and systemic conditions facilitate or obstruct implementation.

Study Description 

• Constructivist grounded theory was used to examine affirmative practice among child-welfare professionals in Ontario, Canada.

• Participants were recruited through Children's Aid Societies (CAS) across Ontario.

• Eligibility required participants to:

  • Be at least 18.

  • Be English-speaking.

  • Currently work at an Ontario CAS.

  • Have experience with a child or family for whom LGBTQ+ identity was relevant.

• The final sample included 43 child-welfare professionals representing different professional roles and substantial sector experience.

• More than half had worked in child welfare for 16 years or longer.

• Data collection involved:

  • Five Zoom focus groups, with 7–10 participants each, lasting approximately 60 minutes.

  • Three individual interviews for participants unable to attend the groups.

• Participants discussed:

  • How LGBTQ+ considerations informed decision-making.

  • Barriers to affirmative care.

  • Strategies supporting affirmative practice.

• Analysis involved:

  • Open and axial coding.

  • Constant comparison and triangulation.

  • Intercoder agreement checks targeting ≥95%.

  • Member checking by child-welfare, LGBTQ+, and lived-experience experts.

Unique Findings 

• The core process identified was Taking Responsibility.

  • Professionals described affirmation as actively assuming responsibility for ensuring LGBTQ+ identities and identity-related harms were recognized and addressed throughout child-welfare practice.

  • LGBTQ+-knowledgeable staff frequently stepped into cases outside their formal responsibilities when they believed youths' identity-related needs were being overlooked.

• Professionals enacted this responsibility through five interconnected processes:

1. Communicating and cueing affirmation

• Workers communicated safety by normalizing LGBTQ+ identities, using correct names and pronouns, avoiding heteronormative assumptions, displaying affirming symbols, challenging stigmatizing comments, and discussing identity directly with youth and caregivers.

• Participants emphasized that knowing LGBTQ+ terminology was insufficient: professionals also needed the skills and confidence to hold substantive conversations about identity and youths' practical needs.

2. Capturing identities

• Collecting sexual orientation and gender identity information was viewed as necessary for understanding youths' experiences and making appropriate decisions.

• Participants identified inconsistent systems for recording identity-related harm as a serious problem. For example, family rejection could be coded as generic "caregiver-child conflict," implicitly locating the problem in the young person's behavior rather than the caregiver's rejection.

• Participants argued that family responses to LGBTQ+ identity should be understood as a child-safety issue and incorporated throughout assessment and case planning.

3. Generating creative workarounds

• Because formal systems frequently lacked LGBTQ+-specific procedures and resources, affirming workers created informal solutions.

• These included developing their own supervision templates, sharing tools between regions, creating working groups, adapting documentation, and developing local training.

• These workarounds helped individual workers provide better care but simultaneously demonstrated that affirmation often depended on individual initiative rather than institutionalized systems.

4. Leveraging leadership

• Leadership was crucial but inconsistent across agencies and teams.

• Some agencies established formal procedures such as mandatory supervisory consultations when LGBTQ+ youth or families entered care and periodic reviews of youths' affirming support networks.

• Participants emphasized that affirmative practice should not depend on whether a worker happens to have an affirming supervisor or LGBTQ+-knowledgeable colleague.

• Responsibility therefore needs to move from individual "champions" toward organizational accountability.

5. Partnering and resourcing

• Affirmative care depended on relationships both inside and outside child-welfare agencies.

• Internal affinity/action groups and external LGBTQ+ organizations provided expertise, referrals, resources, and support.

• Partnerships were particularly important where agencies lacked specialized internal capacity.

• Across the themes, a central tension emerged: creative workarounds are evidence of worker commitment, but their necessity is also evidence of system failure.

• When affirmative care depends primarily on knowledgeable individuals voluntarily filling institutional gaps, support becomes inconsistent and vulnerable to staff turnover.

  Conclusions 

• LGBTQ+ affirmative child-welfare practice requires organizational systems that make affirmation routine, expected, measurable, and sustainable.

• Agencies should integrate LGBTQ+ affirmation into:

  • Intake and assessment.

  • Identity-data collection.

  • Case documentation.

  • Supervision.

  • Safety assessment.

  • Placement and caregiver evaluation.

  • Training.

  • Leadership accountability.

  • Community partnerships.

• Short, one-off LGBTQ+ training sessions are unlikely to be sufficient, requiring skills-based, practice-relevant training embedded into core child-protection education and daily professional responsibilities.

• The emergent framework shifts responsibility away from expecting LGBTQ+ youth to navigate systems or find individual affirming workers and toward expecting child-welfare organizations themselves to assume responsibility for affirmative care.

• Future mixed-method and implementation research should identify specific affirmative practice competencies and test whether they improve child-welfare processes and outcomes for LGBTQ+ youth.