That was a very good tip. The bug had nothing to do with this collection, but seems to reside deeper down:

The Area object (which has getChildren) contains another Entity AreaInterviewDetails, which itself contains another Entity using an @OneToOne(cascade=CascadeType.ALL). This entity, named EmbeddedBlob is annotated with @Cache(usage = CacheConcurrencyStrategy.NONE) - as it should be, since the Blob contained is not cacheable anyway. If I change the annotation to@OneToOne(cascade=CascadeType.ALL, fetch = FetchType.LAZY) everything works fine.

So it seems like the CacheConcurrencyStrategy is not honored correctly when the entity is eager fetched