Telling different stories about poverty, inequality and child abuse and neglect

Mainstream discussions about child abuse and neglect remain disconnected from wider appreciation of what harms children and how such issues are related to wider social and economic forces. This paper draws from on-going work on framing and the role of stories in rendering poverty and inequality either irrelevant or invisible and offers some thoughts on how an alternative story needs to be developed and fought for in order to improve children’s welfare and safety

Ireland\u27s Opportunity to Learn from England\u27s Difficulties? Auditing Uncertainty in Child Protection

This article draws from the authors’ experiences of research in England on aspects of New Labour’s reforms in the field of child protection to counsel caution against standardisation processes currently underway in the Republic of Ireland. It is argued that such processes are deeply problematic when dealing with the complexity of child protection work. Alternatives to standardisation are offered drawing from the literature on systems design. Such alternatives are likely to build confidence and trust in services

How child protection’s ‘investigative turn’ impacts on poor and deprived communities

In recent years there have been major changes in responses to children in need with an ‘investigative turn’ because of widening suspicion of abuse and neglect. This turn is located within an increasingly harsh policy context where support services are being hollowed out at the same time as more families are experiencing poverty and its attendant pressures. This article examines these changes in response to need and outlines the ‘investigative turn’ which it is argued results from a broadening of what is considered reasonable cause to suspect significant harm. It combines research data to show that deprived families experience significant levels of child protection investigations questioning the efficacy of this particularly when these families already suffer high levels of need and shame

Let’s stop feeding the risk monster: towards a social model of ‘child protection’

This article explores how the child protection system currently operates in England. It analyses how policy and practice has developed, and articulates the need for an alternative approach. It draws from the social model as applied in the fields of disability and mental health, to begin to sketch out more hopeful and progressive possibilities for children, families and communities. The social model specifically draws attention to the economic, environmental and cultural barriers faced by people with differing levels of (dis)ability, but has not been used to think about ‘child protection’, an area of work in England that is dominated by a focus on risk and risk aversion. This area has paid limited attention to the barriers to ensuring children and young people are cared for safely within families and communities, and the social determinants of much of the harms they experience have not been recognised because of the focus on individualised risk factors

‘When you're sitting in the room with two people one of whom… has bashed the hell out of the other’:Possibilities and challenges in the use of FGCs and restorative approaches following domestic violence

Domestic violence continues to be a primary reason for referrals to state child welfare services in advanced industrialised countries. There is growing concern in many state child welfare services to develop responses to it that are both more effective and more humane. The use of restorative approaches, in particular Family Group Conferences (FGCs), has been suggested as one such response. This article draws from data gathered from an evaluation of a UK Government funded “Innovation Project” part of which extended the use of FGCs in an urban local authority area which was already making extensive use of them. This paper presents and explores a typology of FGCs used in situations of domestic violence: pragmatic, resolution-focussed and restorative FGCs, developed from the evaluation data and augmented by relevant literature. The study data revealed pragmatic FGCs to be the most used, restorative the least. It is suggested that each type of FGC brings potential benefits but only restorative FGCs offer the possibility of full restoration in the traditionally understood sense. It is argued that the present mother-centric, risk-adverse, child protection systems which currently operate in many countries provide a powerful resistor to the greater implementation of this restorative way of working.</p

Toward full integration of quantitative and qualitative methods in case study research: insights from investigating child welfare inequalities

Delineation of the full integration of quantitative and qualitative methods throughout all stages of multisite mixed methods case study projects remains a gap in the methodological literature. This article offers advances to the field of mixed methods by detailing the application and integration of mixed methods throughout all stages of one such project; a study of child welfare inequalities. By offering a critical discussion of site selection and the management of confirmatory, expansionary and discordant data, this article contributes to the limited body of mixed methods exemplars specific to this field. We propose that our mixed methods approach provided distinctive insights into a complex social problem, offering expanded understandings of the relationship between poverty, child abuse, and neglect

Rethinking child protection and adoption: achieving social justice in practice

This article presents contributions made at the ‘Rethinking Fostering and Adoption: Achieving Social Justice in Practice’ plenary at the 2019 Social Work Action Network conference. The contributors write from a variety of vantage points but share the view that the current child protection and adoption system in England requires radical transformation in order to become more humane, supportive and socially just. The article begins with an outline of the ‘investigative turn’ in children’s services and key findings from the adoption enquiry of the British Association of Social Workers. It goes on to argue, from lived experience perspectives, that we urgently need a new kind of children’s social care system that foregrounds support, rights, social inclusion and trauma prevention