Introduction

This chapter looks at the relevance of complexity theory to understanding child protection. It is argued that over the past 50 years, approaches to the understanding of and practice of dealing with child protection issues have been guided by a largely linear approach, with an increasing emphasis on controls and proceduralised responses. Despite this, children continue to be abused and regularly die. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) gathers together statistics from a range of different sources about child deaths in England and Wales. In their recent briefing paper (NSPCC, 2013), they estimate that there is at least one death per week attributable to child abuse; official statistics from the US put the number of deaths from child abuse at around five per day (United States Government Accountability Office, 2011). This chapter seeks to critique existing responses to child protection using concepts from complexity theory.

Data from casualty departments show unexplained causes of injury to children as a significant feature in admissions of children to hospital. Evidence would suggest that there has been very little significant change to these data in the last 20 years (Louwers et al, 2010; ROSPA, 2012). Privately, many professionals accept that child protection systems will never stop or detect all child abuse. Indeed, this was acknowledged by Munro in her comprehensive review of child protection (Munro, 2011). Nevertheless, huge amounts of time and money are going into structures for intervention with very little empirical evidence of success, cost-effectiveness or finding the ‘holy grail’ of child protection: a diagnostic tool that will predict the degree of risk to any given child.

So, why do we believe that complexity theory has something to contribute to this area? Both of the authors come from social work practice backgrounds within different settings, yet they also have an abiding interest and background in the natural and life sciences. In 2003, one of the authors missed a train and had an hour to wait for the next one. The author was attracted to a book while browsing, called Ubiquity: the science of history or why the world is simpler than we think (Buchanan, 2001). The author bought it and read it on the train.