NORWEGIAN PARLIAMENTARY OMBUDSMAN National Preventive Mechanism ANNUAL REPORT 2020 32 When Children Live Alone With Adults in a Child Welfare Institution Since 2016, the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s Preventive Mechanism (NPM) has visited 21 children’s welfare institutions. On several occasions we have met adolescents who live alone together with staff – without other children or adolescents. In this article, we look closer at our provisional findings concerning the risk of violation of children’s rights in situations where children live alone with adult staff, without choosing to do so. Various reasons why adolescents live alone with adults Some adolescents live alone as a voluntary solution based on dialogue between the adolescent and the staff of the institution. These are children who tell us that they need a more calm and structured environment than what they get from living together with other children. They experience that school and other activities provide them with the contact with peers that they need. We do not further examine these situations here. However, the Ombudsman is concerned about situations where adolescents live alone with staff on an involuntary basis, regardless of whether an administrative decision has been made to place them separate from other childern or not.1 In some cases, it is difficult to obtain a solid explanation from the institution as to why the adolescent lives alone. At some institutions we 1 View from a child welfare institution visited by the NPM. We will not address particular problem issues concerning the use of so-called “motivational trips” at drug and alcohol dependency treatment institutions, that was thoroughly covered in the reports after the visit to Klokkegårdenkollektivet and Skjerfheimkollektivet and the follow-up from these visits. See reports and follow-up here: https://www.sivilombudsmannen.no/en/ visit-reports/