Family and Child Welfare Centre
Head: Krisztina Stehlik-Németh
Address: 2030 Érd, Rómer Flóris tér 1.
Phone: 36-23/746-983, 36-20/329-4933
Please note: telephone customer service is available in Hungarian only. For assistance in English, please contact us by email.
Email: jaras@szocgond.hu
The Family and Child Welfare Centre establishes the fundamental rules according to which the state, local governments, natural and legal persons involved in child protection, as well as other organisations without legal personality, provide assistance through specified services and measures to ensure the enforcement of the rights and interests of children as set out in legislation, and to support the fulfilment of parental responsibilities. It also ensures the prevention and elimination of situations endangering children, the substitution of missing parental care, and the social integration of young adults leaving child protection care. The Child Protection Act defines, in order to achieve the above objectives, the fundamental rights of children and the guarantees for the enforcement of these rights, as well as the system and basic rules of child protection.
Local governments providing child protection, guardianship authorities, courts, the police, the prosecution service, the probation service, and other organisations and persons shall, in the application of this Act, act in the best interests of the child and ensure the rights recognised by law.
Organisations and persons acting under the Child Protection Act shall cooperate with the family in the course of their activities and, in accordance with legislation, promote the child’s upbringing within the family. Services supporting the child’s upbringing within the family shall be provided in a way that is adapted to the child’s and the family’s situation and needs.
The safety of a child removed from the family for any reason, as well as care, upbringing and healthy personality development appropriate to the child’s age and needs, must be ensured. The requirement of equal treatment must be observed in the protection of children.
In order to support the child’s upbringing within the family and to prevent the child from becoming at risk, the Centre provides individual and group-based specialised services and programmes tailored to the child’s needs and requirements.
Within this framework, it provides:
- street and housing estate social work,
- supervised contact arrangements, including mediation procedures,
- an on-call child protection signalling service,
- legal information and psychological counselling,
- family therapy and family group decision-making conferences.
It carries out child protection activities related to official measures within the framework of child protection care:
- It initiates the placement of the child under protection or, in cases of more severe endangerment, the child’s temporary placement or placement into care.
- It prepares proposals, in proportion to the degree of endangerment, for placing the child under protection, providing family allowance in kind, promoting the fulfilment of the child’s compulsory education, removing the child from the family, determining or changing the future place of care, and waiving, ordering, maintaining or terminating preventive probation.
- It cooperates with the probation service and the preventive probation officer in order to prevent reoffending if the guardianship authority has ordered preventive probation for the child.
- In order to facilitate the return of a child removed from the family, it coordinates and carries out social support work – in cooperation with the institution providing residential care or the territorial child protection professional service – in order to create and improve the family’s child-rearing conditions and to restore the relationship between the parent and the child.
- It carries out aftercare – in cooperation with the child protection guardian – in order to support the child’s reintegration into the family.
- In the case of a child under protection, it prepares the care and upbringing plan, coordinates and carries out social support work, and, upon request by the guardianship authority, prepares a spending plan related to the provision of family allowance in kind.
Using the services
The services are available free of charge. Information provision, supportive conversations, assistance in official matters, home visits, conflict management, referral to other services, measures related to adoption, participation in placement hearings, participation in review hearings, case discussions with members of the signalling system, and case conferences.