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Although public and academic works have already focused on the relatives of people facing extreme poverty, very little knowledge has been produced on the family circle of children in out-of-home placement. This assessment called for an exploratory research on this specific, and often stigmatised, group, carried out for the French Observatory of Poverty and Social Exclusion (ONPES). With the insight of literature and interviews with relatives of children in out-of-home placement (or soon-to-be), this work analyses their personal trajectories, material constraints, needs and perspectives on the out-of-home placement measures they face. To this end, the paper first reviews the existing literature on children placement and protection, focusing on how policy approach on parental responsibility has changed over time. It then analyses and synthetises the findings of the field survey conducted with the relatives of children in out-of-home placement (mostly parents), in order to identify the patterns and the causes of their invisibility. A third and last part concludes by opening further research questions and promoting a renewed approach on this issue.