Child maltreatment is a well-known problem in the European Region (Sethi et al., 2013; Davies, Ward, 2012). In Italy, the number of children under 17 living away from their families has increased from 33.042 in 1999 to 39.698 in 2010 (+20%). Over a fifth of them are immigrant children. Data shows that most of children spend on average twenty months in one of the nearly 3000 Italian reception centres, each case being looked after by a large group of practitioners, including educators, social workers, psychologists, legal advisors, municipal authorities, and teachers.

The strong growth of child protection services has triggered a large debate about the effectiveness of educational and social care. As a result, a perspective change has been suggested away from the traditional protection model, which defers exclusive authority over decisions to the professionals, to a new inclusive approach focused on families’ participation. This participative paradigm sees interventions as user-led as much as service-driven, considering the families’ viewpoint as crucial to ensure effective educational work (Lonne et al., 2009; Roose et al., 2008). This implies that practitioners should be able to acquire a more reflective stance on the families’ perspectives in terms of meaning assigned by children and parents to the service's practices (Postle, 2007; Ruch, 2005).

However, over the years the requirements of bureaucratic work as well as the increase in practitioners’ numbers has contributed to a spread in the practice of report-writing in welfare agencies (Hennum, 2011; Hummel, 1994). As a consequence, nowadays written documentation plays a core role in the process of managing cases of maltreated children: every decision about the child is made on the basis of written reports derived from observations, interviews, and meetings aimed at building a visible history of the entire process through the collection of records. Therefore, reports actually have a strong influence on outcomes for children and families (Turney et al., 2012).

As we noted, many of the child protection cases involve immigrant families and their children. Assuming that documentation is the production of a neutral and unbiased object, welfare services usually claim to adopt a fair and equal stance in treating immigrant and local children. However, in-depth analysis of the same documentation as a particular kind of “storytelling” about the child shows that services regularly use documents as an implicit way of defining what should be considered normal or deviant from the social and cultural point of view (Gillman et al., 1997; Salmon, 2010).

Consequently, deconstructing the documentation work helps us to emphasize the central role that subjectivity and power play in orienting pivotal educational decisions concerning the inclusion or exclusion of immigrant families and their children. To this end, we adopted a theoretical framework which refers to documents respectively as (1) a discursive rite operating by ‘rules of exclusion’ (Foucault, 1972; Garrity, 2010), (2) performative acts enabling forms of authoritative speech (Austin, 1970; Butler 1993), and (3) milestones defining the ‘moral career’ of children in social care (Goffman, 1961; Hall et al., 2006). This framework helps us to understand documentation as a twofold process both produced, i.e. creating a conceptual and terminological framework for organizational practices, and productive, i.e. building an image of organization as legitimate power (Atkinson, Coffey, 2004; Prior, 2008).

Accordingly, our research aims to answer these questions:

-       Is the storytelling that is implied in case documentation leading practitioners to employ more reflective practices?

-       How does documentation take into account cultural differences as a core feature in working inclusively with immigrant children and their families?

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