Norway is generally a good country to live in, for most of the Norwegians. Job security may be good - perhaps too good, it's almost impossible for a company to get rid of employees if they don't perform well, and for the public sector it's even more difficult. Competent people that are unhappy with their current position can just move on and find a better job, incompetent and lazy people tend to be stuck with the job they have. I do remember from when I went to school, it was a big problem that there were some few bad teachers, and impossible to get rid of them. The problem may also grow, competent people also prefer to work with other competent people, and in particular with incompetent leaders the good people will "vote with their legs" - hence a school may end up with very few skilled teachers left.

It would be very bad of me to generalize, for sure there are lots of good people employed by the public sector in Norway (I think the teacher of our ten years old son is a good teacher and a good person, our son was mostly in conflict with other employees, teachers and perhaps children at the school). The rotten apples exists. I think the risk is particularly big for bad people to end up in the child protection agency. Newly employed young people may start there with the best intentions (but with a serious lack of life experience and experience with children and parenting). They probably experience a lot of shit, the parents are usually hostile towards the service, and whatever the employees there will do it will be wrong. If they fail to act towards the really bad families (think of violence, sexual abuse and parents having problems with alcohol or other drugs) they risk to be shamed by media, if they do intervene such that a family becomes split they will also risk to be ashamed in the media. I think few people are mentally prepared to stay in such a job, keep up the motivation and perform well - the rest will either move on and find another job, or they will continue working but with a lack of motivation and competence. In our case I think they did a very poor job on the investigation, they took a lot of shortcuts, they didn't listen to us, they just wanted to make good statistics on the number of families they had "helped", and when we didn't want to play their game they tried to be tough on us ... without any consideration at all on what's good for the children.

I also believe we need some structural changes, we're going down a very nasty path now - it seems like the average politician is too young to remember DDR. When I grew up, confidentiality was considered sacred. By now they have changed the rules, i.e. health workers are by now mandated by law to report to the relevant authorities i.e. if someone visits the doctor to ask for help against drug or alcohol abuse. If a person would drink two litres of beer every evening, if the doctor would learn, they are mandated to report this as an alcohol problem, the driving license will be taken away even if the person has never been driving under the influence of alcohol, and the child protection agency will also become involved. Everyone is encouraged to report to the child protection agency if they just have the faintest suspicion that something is wrong.

The child protection agency sent lots of information requests and based their "research" on us on that - like, the dentist reported back that they didn't like the smell of the mother (but they didn't know if it was the mother or if it was the fur coat that). The mother had a heated debate with the dentist on what's more healthy of skimmed milk and full-fat milk (for the teeth, it doesn't matter at all), hence the dentist was filing in the report that the mother was "unwilling to receive advices". They asked the police if they had anything on us, the police sent a full report on everything that was on file on us (I don't even think I have the right to see this stuff), without background knowledge or juridical competence the child protection agency quickly concluded that we were criminals. It's just ... wrong! It shouldn't be like that.