A System of Care, Not Control: Co-Designing Online Safety and Wellbeing Solutions with Guardians ad Litem for Youth in Child Welfare

TL;DR

This paper explores how Guardians ad Litem perceive online safety for youth in child welfare, emphasizing collaborative, trust-building solutions over restrictive controls, and proposes design concepts to enhance communication and support.

Contribution

It introduces a participatory workshop approach with GALs to co-design technology solutions tailored to youth in child welfare, highlighting the importance of holistic, multi-stakeholder online safety.

Findings

GALs face challenges due to limited digital literacy and institutional support.

Designs should foster stability, trust, and meaningful interactions.

Proposed tools include virtual avatars and mobile apps to enhance communication.

Abstract

Current online safety technologies overly rely on parental mediation and often fail to address the unique challenges faced by youth in the Child Welfare System (CWS). These youth depend on a complex ecosystem of support, including families, caseworkers, and advocates, to safeguard their wellbeing. Within this network, Guardians ad Litem (GALs) play a unique role as court-appointed advocates tasked with ensuring the best interests of youth. Yet little is known about how GALs perceive and support youths' online safety. To address this gap, we conducted a two-part workshop with 10 GALs to explore their perspectives on online safety and collaboratively envision technology-based solutions tailored to the needs of youth in the CWS. Our findings revealed that GALs struggle to support youth with online safety challenges due to limited digital literacy, inconsistency of institutional support, lack of collaboration among stakeholders, and complexity of family dynamics. While GALs recognized the need for some oversight of youth online activities, they emphasized designing systems that support online safety beyond control or restriction by fostering stability, trust, and meaningful interactions, both online and offline. GALs emphasized the importance of developing tools that enable ongoing communication, therapeutic support, and coordination across stakeholders. Proposed design concepts focused on strengthening youth agency and cross-stakeholder collaboration through virtual avatars and mobile apps. This work provides actionable design concepts for strengthening relationships and communication across care network. It also redefines traditional approaches to online safety, advocating for a holistic, multi-stakeholder online safety paradigm for youth in the CWS.