Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes the right to participation: children and adolescents are entitled to participate and to have their views taken into account in all issues affecting them in accordance to their age and maturity. The volume explores this right to participation in residential care. The impact of participation and complaint procedures in residential care facilities are evaluated by means of crucial results from an empirical study. How do these participation and complaints procedures work? The authors discuss crucial facilitators and barriers with regard to the implementation of children’s rights to participate.

The edited volume presents the far-reaching research findings of the project “Participation in Organisational Cultures of Residential Education”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), relating them to national and international research findings. In the course of strengthening children’s rights in child and youth welfare due to the current reform through the Child and Youth Strengthening Act on the one hand and incidents of violence in residential institutions for children and young people worldwide on the other, the project on the study of participation and complaint processes covers a wide-ranging topic that is of central interest both internationally and nationally. While the implementation of participation and complaints procedures for the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been carried out across the board in residential education in Germany, there are no empirically validated findings to date on how these participation and complaints procedures work. Participation and complaints procedures are assigned protective functions – children and young people should be able to complain about grievances with the help of these procedures.

Central research gaps on the aforementioned topic are listed and filled with the help of the research results. The research findings are thereby placed in various discourses: for example, basic theoretical insights into the development of a theory of complaints. This has not been developed to date, although the UN CRC stipulates complaints procedures for children and adolescents to protect their rights, especially in residential education. The volume offers theoretical concepts on this based on the processed research findings. In addition, key insights into the organisational cultures of residential education are presented and how these cultures limit or enable the participation and complaint possibilities of children and young people. These findings are important for both the disciplinary national and international professional discourse, as it very specifically concerns the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the protection of children and young people in institutions. The results are also prepared for professional discourse – what can be learned from the research results with regard to the design of a professional institution? Likewise, complaint processes in the facilities are placed in the context of the children’s and young people’s experiences of victimisation.