54 results
10 - Protecting children: a social model for the 2020s
- Edited by Robin Sen, University of Edinburgh, Christian Kerr, Leeds Beckett University
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- Book:
- The Future of Children's Care
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2023, pp 178-193
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Summary
Introduction
Protecting Children: A Social Model was published in 2018. In this chapter we revisit some core arguments and critically interrogate these, in the light of the experience of COVID-19. Our conclusions are sobering as we reflect on what the pandemic revealed about the state, its responses and the deepening of patterns of power, wealth, inequality and exploitation (Davies et al, 2022). However, we also note that many of the core assumptions of the social model have been reinforced by what we have learned about our vulnerabilities and interdependencies during the pandemic, and we argue for the importance of engaging with the array of constituencies who are seeking to build more progressive futures.
Background
The social model of protecting children emerged from, and continues to be nourished by, those carving out spaces for resistance to old and harmful child protection policies and practices. Essentially, it challenged the following highly individualising narrative:
• The harms children and young people need protecting from are normally located within individual families and are due to acts of omission or commission by parents and/or other adult caretakers, with the assessment of intra-familial risks and strengths core business for professionals.
• These acts are normally understood through frames that focus on the role of individual choices or psychological and relational dynamics with considerations such as the socio-economic contexts in which families live largely screened out.
• Developing expert practice methodologies to change behaviours and choices is a key policy objective, particularly since 2010.
• Developing expert-led procedures, multi-agency work and professional expertise are all key to protecting children from harm.
In the social model we located our challenge to this narrative within wider understandings of how notions of responsibility and causation have shifted over the last decades, thus placing developments within child protection within a broader economic and societal canvas. We noted the shift in discourses from explanations for social problems that refer to history, backgrounds and contexts, to ones which discount these, replacing understanding with moral judgment of individuals and correction of their behaviour:
Individuals are thus held largely or wholly responsible for their fortunes. If their pasts have been difficult, they can and must take steps to free themselves from their pasts from now on. This individualistic understanding of society fits well with common sense thought.
2 - Contemporary Developments in Child Protection in England: Reform or Reaction?
- Edited by Michael Lavalette, Liverpool Hope University
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- Book:
- What Is the Future of Social Work?
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 03 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 02 October 2019, pp 23-38
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter argues that a dangerous disconnect has become increasingly apparent since 2010 in England allowing successive governments to claim they are improving child protection while simultaneously promoting and implementing policies that increase the numbers of children living in poverty, reduce the support services available to them, and reinforce the inequalities that limit their potential.
Key developments in the current policy climate will be discussed, locating these in a historical canvas; and alternative understandings drawing from research on the relationship between poverty, inequality and the harms children and their families suffer will be provided. The chapter will explore why a social model of ‘child protection’ is needed, outline its main features, and address how it might offer progressive possibilities for families and those who work with them as well as wider society.
Contemporary visions
We want every child in the country, whatever their background, whatever their age, whatever their ethnicity or gender, to have the opportunity to fulfil their potential. Children's social care services have an essential role to play – whether by keeping children safe from harm, finding the best possible care when children cannot live at home, or creating the conditions that enable children to thrive and achieve. To make that happen, it is essential that everybody working within children's social care has the knowledge and skills to do their jobs well, and the organisational leadership and culture to support and challenge them to keep improving. (DfE 2016: 3)
In 2016 the Department for Education (DfE) articulated its vision for child protection, identifying activity in relation to three areas: people and leadership; practice and systems; governance and accountability. It highlighted initiatives to bring the ‘best’ people into the profession, give them the ‘right’ knowledge and skills and develop leaders equipped to nurture practice excellence. It stressed the importance of creating the right environment for excellent practice and innovation to flourish, using data to show strengths and weaknesses in the system, and developing innovative organisational models with the potential to radically improve services.
Protecting Children
- A Social Model
- Brid Featherstone, Anna Gupta, Kate Morris, Sue White
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- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 12 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 19 September 2018
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This book explores the policy and practice possibilities offered by a social model of child protection. Drawing on developments in mental health and disability studies, it examines the conceptual, political and practice implications of this new framework.
three - Building better people: policy aspirations and family life
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Protecting Children
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 12 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 19 September 2018, pp 45-66
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Summary
Introduction
Sympathy requires an important intellectual and emotional bond between people far apart in space and time. Our biological age has reopened questions about the nature of this bond. (Fuller, 2006: 119)
[A] human mind needs the rest of its body, suitable surroundings and a full memory of past activities if it is to think and act. And it needs them every bit as badly as it needs its brain. (Midgley, 2014: 53)
In the previous chapter, we described the forces that coalesced to support the current dominant modus operandi in child protection and welfare. We argued that models of risk and predictability have converged with the international rise of bureaucratic managerialism and centralised state control of local provision through the regulation and inspection of marketised services. These factors have created the conditions for a moral settlement to take a firm hold. This is characterised by a residual, but strongly legitimised, role for the state in preventing damage to children, which carries high levels of opprobrium for those parents seen as failing to optimise their child's developmental potential. The idea that childhood experiences are important and can be formative clearly has a common-sense truth to it and obviously traumatic experiences in childhood will have lasting impacts. However, a vocabulary has emerged in which notions of toxic parenting and the quest for optimum developmental flourishing create new mandates for the state to act. We argue that these are necessary to explain the sharp rises in national rates of child removal, and particularly permanent removal of very small children documented over the last decade. They also contribute to service fragmentation by privileging intervention in the early years in the form of ‘evidence-based’ parenting programmes.
Rewriting social deprivation in bodies and brains: the great leap backwards
The learned debate about the nature of inequality in class and ethnically stratified societies is a spurious controversy. All major positions, ranging from biological determinism associated with conservative ideologies to environmentalism linked with liberal politics, are actually rationalizations for the status quo of intergroup relations. One key underlying idea shared among seemingly opposed experts is that the position of the oppressed stems from their own weaknesses. (Valentine et al, 1975: 117)
two - Trouble ahead? Contending discourses in child protection
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Protecting Children
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp 27-44
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Summary
If the last 150 years of social thought has taught anything, it is that our understanding of normality is more a product of historical provincialism than genuinely universal intuitions. Thus, a critical sense of sympathy serves as a reminder that the proper object of sympathy is a common future cohabitable by ourselves and others to whom we would extend sympathy regardless of the differences that most immediately strike us …. (Fuller, 2006: 120 emphasis in original)
In this chapter, using the UK system as an exemplar, we consider the history of attempts to improve the way families look after children. We trace the current child protection system and its twists and turns. As we have argued in the Introduction, more and more of the sorrows of life are being defined as the proper business of a child welfare system predicated on surveillance. While the state and its resources allegedly shrink, its gaze is harder and its tongue sharper. As part of an increasingly residual role, the system has become narrowly focused on an atomised child, severed from family, relationships and social circumstances: a precarious object of ‘prevention’, or rescue. As its categories and definitions have gradually grown, the gap between child protection services and family support, or ordinary help, has, somewhat paradoxically, widened. This has a number of antecedents. First, with the exception of a few decades of the 20th century, history shows a strong tendency towards individual social engineering to produce model citizens, with parenting practices the primary focus of state attention. Second, a version of evidence and expertise has flourished in which interventions become analogous to doses of a drug, with clearly delineated packages delivered over strict time scales. Third, the post-war welfare consensus has withered in the face of market enchantment and a burgeoning commissioning paradigm. Fourth and finally, the logics of managerial efficiency have flourished and, in a climate of reduced public spending, are king. These things together create intellectual apartheid (Midgley, 2013), with perfectly valid and vital understandings of life squeezed out of the policy, and increasingly the practice, sphere. We begin by summarising key moments in the early history of child protection, tracing, from these to the present day, a great leap backwards.
References
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Protecting Children
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- Bristol University Press
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- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp 169-186
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five - A social model for protecting children: changing our thinking?
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Protecting Children
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- Bristol University Press
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- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp 83-106
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Summary
There can be no question that family case workers are in an exceptional position to make valuable observations on family life at first hand where they are protected, as they should be, from too large a case-load, and where they have had the kind of theoretical training in social science and practical training in social work which supplies them with the necessary background. ‘The interplay,’ says Professor Park, ‘of the attractions, tensions, and accommodations of personalities in the intimate bonds of family life have up to the present found no concrete description or adequate analysis in sociological inquiry.’ (Richmond, 1922: 227–8)
There is an irony in our resurrection of the social in social work. Mary Richmond, an early 20th-century social work pioneer, had in mind that social workers could make important contributions to social science. It is noteworthy that she quotes the sociologist Robert Park to argue that social workers might fill a gap which sociology had left open. Indeed, Richmond is widely seen as making a major contribution to the Chicago School of Sociology, with its emphasis on the ethnographic study of everyday lives. We would like to suggest that much may be gained by resuscitating the social dimensions of child protection practice, in order to nurture humane practice, through thorough understandings of the lives in the living, and also to inform with social science the ‘evidence base’ for policy and system design.
As we have noted previously, other areas of practice (than child protection) have much more clearly, in recent decades, highlighted the importance of the social and have been helpful to our thinking. In particular the ‘social model’ has challenged thinking across a range of fields, including disability and mental health. It has provided a philosophy and framework for articulating practices that challenge dominant biomedical models and their narrow focus on individual impairments, disease and risk. It has drawn attention to the economic, environmental and cultural barriers faced by people with differing levels of (dis)ability and built on a movement where those needing services were instrumental in articulating their rights to full participation in service design.
In this chapter we discuss the evolution of the social model in areas such as disability and mental health. In these domains, there has been a very clear ‘other’ to which the social model was responding – medicine and the notion of biological damage.
one - Introduction
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Protecting Children
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- Bristol University Press
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- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp 1-26
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Summary
In 2014 Re-imagining Child Protection: Towards Humane Social Work with Families (Featherstone, White and Morris, 2014) was published. It was greeted with great interest and there was an overwhelmingly positive response to the critical review it undertook of contemporary child protection and its plea for humane practice. It resonated with practitioners and policy makers alike and suggested simply doing more of the same was neither ethical nor practicable. The book concluded by arguing for change in order to create policies and practices that inspired hope.
Many would argue that the problems have become more, not less, acute in the intervening period and the anxieties about the future set out in Re-imagining Child Protection have become more fully realised in the context of continued austerity and its disproportionate focus and impact on deprived families and local authorities. However, there have been also been more hopeful developments, including new empirical work that increases our understandings, innovations in practice that push at the constraints of the existing child protection project and fresh alliances seeking change. Using these positive developments this book is concerned with moving the discussion forward, and with seeking to provoke conceptual and applied debates that might offer children and families a more hopeful future when they face problems, uncertainties and harm.
Telling a new story
George Monbiot (2017: 1) argues that ‘[y] ou cannot take away someone's story without giving them a new one. It is not enough to challenge an old narrative, however outdated and discredited it may be. Change happens only when you replace it with another.’ In this book we tell a new story, but one that has familiar chapters, rooted in social work's history. It is informed by our ethical positions and our research, and is encouraged by our engagement with those who experience current systems, and those who work in them. Like all good stories, there is room in the telling for different voices to chip in, add, challenge and, indeed, revise. Thus, while we consider the book contains much of what is needed to get us started on the road to transformation, it is only the start. As we go along, we identify what needs to change, why and how, but we also highlight the allies and conversations needed for the next steps.
Contents
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Protecting Children
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
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- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp iii-iii
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eight - Crafting different stories: changing minds and hearts
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Protecting Children
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- Bristol University Press
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- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp 143-158
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Summary
Introduction
In this penultimate chapter we shift gear in order to think about how we might change the conversation on ‘child protection’. We explore the specific issues of seeking to effect social change within a ‘post-truth’ climate and discuss how we might draw from work in social psychology, cognitive linguistics and the sociology of emotions to learn the craft of telling stories. It is hoped such stories might promote identification across divided sections of the population and key into and promote shared values, in order to develop a social model of protecting children.
In doing so we remain mindful of the quote with which we opened this book:
Changing the story isn't enough in itself, but it has often been foundational to real changes. Making an injury visible and public is usually the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was long tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious. Which means that every conflict is in part a battle over the story we tell, or who tells and who is heard. (Solnit, 2016: xiv, emphasis added)
Who tells which stories and who is heard are political issues and we seek to offer some thoughts on how we can develop new kinds of ‘politics’ that support the telling of multiple stories by a range of constituencies in inclusive and respectful forums.
Navigating a post-truth landscape
In 2016, The Oxford English Dictionary selected ‘post-truth’ as its word of the year. Defined by the dictionary as an adjective ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ‘, editors said that use of the term ‘post-truth’ had increased by around 2,000% in 2016 compared to the previous year (see Flood, 2016).
Post Brexit, Davies (2016) has noted that one of the complaints made most frequently by liberal commentators, economists and media pundits is that the referendum campaign was conducted without regard to ‘truth’. He argues, however, that this was not quite right. It was more accurate to reflect that it was conducted without adequate regard to the ‘facts’. To the great frustration of the Remain campaign, their ‘facts’ never caught on with the electorate, whereas Leave's ‘facts’ (most famously the £350m/week price tag of EU membership) did appear to be believed.
four - Family experiences of care and protection services: the good, the bad and the hopeful
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Protecting Children
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 12 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 19 September 2018, pp 67-82
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Summary
Being unable to tell your story is a living death, and sometimes a literal one. If no one listens when you say your ex-husband is trying to kill you, if no one believes you when you say you are in pain, if no one hears you when you say help, if you don't dare say help, if you have been trained not to bother people by saying help (Solnit, 2017: 19, emphasis in original).
Introduction
Stories of pain, hurt, betrayal and violence are told to professionals everyday and, indeed, are heard by them often as they struggle with huge caseloads and worries of their own at home and at work. However, a key theme of this book, and central to its mission, is a concern that the language and theoretical and practice tools available to them are impoverished and increasingly inadequate. This is partly due to contemporary challenges in terms of funding of course. We have already highlighted how those services and families who need the most have had the most taken away since 2010. But it is also due to the inadequacy of a model that translates need to risk routinely, colonises a variety of sorrows and troubles within a child protection frame, and has abandoned or lost a sense of the contexts, economic and social, in which so many are living lives of quiet, or not so quiet, desperation.
This chapter brings some of these lives into sharp relief. It has two purposes in the context of this book: first to shine a light on lived realities but second to offer some really vivid examples of how we might begin the process of designing services with families rather than for them. Thus it acts as an essential bridge to the subsequent chapters where a social model is fleshed out across policy and practice contexts.
The chapter draws on a number of studies conducted by the authors, in particular a detailed study of families and their experiences of welfare services, hereafter referred to as Study One (Morris et al, 2018b) and an enquiry on the role of the social worker in adoption, ethics and human rights (Study Two), which explored the perspectives of birth families, adoptive parents and adopted young people (Featherstone et al, 2018).
nine - Concluding thoughts
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Protecting Children
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- Bristol University Press
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- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp 159-168
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Summary
Introduction
Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. (Solnit, 2016: xii)
We are neither optimists nor pessimists and offer our contribution in the belief that what we do does indeed matter. Our premise is that we need to ‘do differently’ as we watch the year-on-year rise in the numbers of children being removed from their families of origin, and the translation of stories of need and trouble into categories of risk and shame.
In this conclusion we note that, in order to do differently, we need bigger conversations than hitherto. These must involve those from a range of endeavours and disciplines and all those concerned with, and impacted by, child protection. We also explore some possibilities for democratising conversations more generally.
Our new story is very different, and shifting paradigms is a complex business. We know we have a considerable distance to travel with these ideas. It may be that only some can take hold initially and we must think longer term about the underpinning changes needed. Nor do we think that we have a route map for the way forward, instead we have a desire for different conversations. Practitioners, families, academics and researchers have more to contribute than we are able to, but we hope we have stimulated an opening discussion based on a new story set out in the preceding chapter and repeated here:
• Currently there are inequalities in children's chances of living safely within their families.
• These inequalities are directly related to deprivation and other forms of inequality such as in physical and mental health.
• Anti-poverty strategies need to be joined up with safeguarding strategies locally and nationally.
• The social determinants of many of the harms experienced by individuals and within families need to be recognised, understood and tackled.
• Social and collective strategies need to be integrated with humane practices directed at individual families.
• To protect children and promote their welfare we need to re-focus services on the contexts in which they live with their families.
seven - Domestic abuse: a case study
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Protecting Children
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp 125-142
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It is not actually possible to say anything. I occasionally notice. Words are general categories that lump together things that are dissimilar in ways that matter … To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous. Categories leak. (Solnit, 2017: 137)
Introduction
We are very mindful that domestic abuse illustrates the perils and possibilities of the approach we are promoting in this book. For example, there are clear dangers in an overly social approach to men and their use of violence that situates each and every one as an instance of the general and a reductive cipher. This can be evident in the approaches taken by ‘perpetrators’ programmes that eschew any engagement with biography, culture and context in favour of universalist understandings. However, there are comparable dangers in promoting approaches that cannot see the contexts in which gendered inequalities intersect with other inequalities such as those of class and ‘race’ and are played out in identities and practices where shame and humiliation are ongoing possibilities.
In Re-imagining Child Protection we made a plea for humane practices with men and women and for seeking to understand from them why so often their lives were marred by abuse and violence. We asked that practitioners talk to individual men and women about their hopes and dreams, their expectations for, and from, each other. Crucially, we suggested there was a need to integrate gendered constructions of masculinities and femininities with biographical and interactional patterns in order to more fully understand and challenge abusive practices and to eschew a hegemonic focus on risk and rupture.
In this book we recognise that although some very welcome practice developments have emerged in recent years, practice stories of risk and rupture remain all too common and there continues to be inadequate attention paid to exploring with men and women what lies behind their experiences of harm and pain. We locate our project within a clearer understanding than is to be found in Re-imagining Child Protection of intersectional analyses and their contribution to engaging with the causes of, and consequences of, abusive behaviours.
six - A social model: experiences in practice
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Protecting Children
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- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp 107-124
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter describes initiatives at a range of levels in order that we can promote conversations and open up possibilities. There is always a risk in presenting examples, but it is important when the critique of the existing child protection project has been so strongly argued, that we can recognise the many ways in which families and professionals are testing out new ways of working.
Looking forward, looking back: ‘tidal hope’
When looking to develop practices within a social model, we need to look forward and consider alternative possibilities, but also not lose sight of what we know from previous studies about what children and families who are struggling find helpful. These stress the importance of practices of ordinary help that are rooted in working within specific communities and neighbourhoods. In Re-imagining Child Protection we noted the work of Jack and Gill (2010) and the histories of patch-based approaches and Sure Start (Featherstone et al, 2014). We have also seen the emergence of new models and frameworks for practice that are seeking to respond to contemporary harms, often digital. Locality and community take on a very different hue in these digital discussions, but cross-cutting themes of inequality and representation remain.
In exploring these examples we must recognise the realities for many deprived communities. Ann Power documents in her book City Survivors the strategies families must employ to survive in areas of urban decay (Power, 2007). More recently Darren McGarvey sets out the everyday realities for those enduring poverty (McGarvey, 2017). What is common across these apparently dissimilar accounts is the erosion of capacity within localities and communities to engage with well-intentioned services. In 2006 the national evaluation of the Children's Fund pointed to the same themes: deprived communities simply did not have the resources to work with services aiming to offer support (Edwards et al, 2006). The evaluation team made the recommendation that, if support initiatives are to be successful, resources and time must be expanded on pre-building community capacity. Over a decade on, this message seems to hold even more true after a decade of austerity and the Great Recession. In a recent study of everyday life in a highly deprived community (Mason, forthcoming) a community leader described the community as living with ‘tidal hope’.
Acknowledgements
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Protecting Children
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- Bristol University Press
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- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp iv-iv
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Frontmatter
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Protecting Children
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- Bristol University Press
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- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp i-ii
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Index
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway University of London, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield
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- Protecting Children
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- Bristol University Press
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- 12 April 2022
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- 19 September 2018, pp 187-192
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Ten - The capability approach: what can it offer child protection policy and practice in England?
- Edited by Hans-Uwe Otto, Universität Bielefeld, Germany, Melanie Walker, University of the Free State - South Campus, South Africa, Holger Ziegler, Universität Bielefeld, Germany
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- Capability-Promoting Policies
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- Bristol University Press
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- 12 April 2022
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- 08 November 2017, pp 183-200
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Summary
Introduction
The capability approach (CA) has been used to assess individual wellbeing and the evaluation of social arrangements, and to develop policies and practices to effect social change. In recent years, the CA has gained attention and influence in a broad number of public policy areas and across academic disciplines. This chapter explores child protection policy and practice in England, an area of social policy that has hitherto received very limited analysis from the perspective of the CA. It presents an overview of child protection policies and practices, their historical development and their current manifestation in contemporary England, where the political context is dominated by neoliberal policies and an ‘austerity’ agenda. It then explores what the CA can offer to further our understanding of the impacts of the child protection system. We make recommendations for the development of a more humane and socially just system that promotes children's and their parents’ capabilities and rights, and recognises their necessary interrelatedness.
In this chapter we analyse two particular aspects of the child protection system from a capability perspective. We critically examine the ways poverty and parenting are constructed in the dominant discourses and the policies and practices that have developed within this context. In addition, drawing on qualitative research with families who have experienced the child protection system, we explore the impact of interventions on parents, and conclude with recommendations for policy and practice that strives for greater social justice. Prior to analysing these aspects, we present an overview view of child protection policies and practices, their historical development and manifestation in contemporary England.
By using the term ‘child protection’ in an English context, we are referring to the laws, policies and practices relating to children deemed to be at risk or likely to be at risk of abuse and neglect. We acknowledge, as Waterhouse and McGhee (2015, p 13) do, that ‘the same words are used to mean different things at different times and different words may be used to mean the same things’. Differences in use and understanding of the terminology around ‘child protection’ and ‘child abuse and neglect’ can be particularly divergent when working across professional and international boundaries (Pösö, 2015).
five - Towards a just culture: designing humane social work organisations
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Re-imagining Child Protection
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 February 2022
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- 14 April 2014, pp 75-94
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Summary
The overall effectiveness of local authority arrangements for the protection of children is inadequate. In February 2009, the Secretary of State issued an improvement notice to Birmingham City Council due to poor performance in safeguarding children and young people. A further improvement notice was issued in September 2010 and during 2011, a major restructure and overhaul of children's services was undertaken with the oversight of the Improvement Board. Since the first improvement notice, Ofsted has undertaken a Safeguarding and Looked After Children inspection and two unannounced inspections of the council's contact, referral and assessment arrangements for children and young people. Concerns with regards to the quality of practice in protecting children have been raised in all three inspection reports (Ofsted, 2012: 16)
Did you hear we became inadequate? We have been in a grief cycle since then. Ofsted has left us running round like headless chickens – we are now going to rush into a restructure. We have not heard much from Munro. I’m fearing that it is going to go into a black hole with Ofsted challenging all the way. I don't feel inadequate, but maybe I am? (personal correspondence with a Senior Manager, in a previously high performing authority, 2013)
That society demands accountability from public services is right and proper. That high standards of practice and service delivery should be expectable is uncontroversial. However, meeting these aspirations in social work services has proved a wicked issue. The quotations above are a stark reminder of the pervasiveness of a blaming culture in statutory children's services which spreads beyond English social work and which has resulted from failed attempts to ensure consistent high standards. The term (and indeed the sensation of being) ‘inadequate’ is strongly correlated with shame – the primary social emotion (Scheff, 1997). That the inspectorate Ofsted should use this particular term to describe struggling authorities is profoundly symbolic of its pernicious and circular effect. In the first quotation, taken from the inspection of the beleaguered Birmingham City Council is illustrative. Despite being under intense scrutiny (at least) since 2009, things are not fixed. If inspection worked, it would surely have worked by now and more inspections would be strongly correlated with rapid and real improvements.
eight - Tainted love: how dangerous families became troubled
- Brid Featherstone, University of Huddersfield, Sue White, The University of Sheffield, Kate Morris, The University of Sheffield
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- Book:
- Re-imagining Child Protection
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 14 April 2014, pp 131-146
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- Chapter
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Summary
This chapter examines the ways in which families with complex needs have been understood and represented in policy discourses, and the implications for social work with families where there are care and protection needs. Family-minded practice has struggled to receive sustained attention in social work, and yet the notion of family as the context for the resolution of children's needs extends the scope for supporting change and provides an accurate reflection of children's lived experiences. The maintenance of connections for children with their birth family has been a focus of concern across the range of social work interventions, and the messages from research repeatedly highlight the role birth families play in future wellbeing (while recognising that for some children living with their family is unsafe and untenable). The difficulties in arriving at approaches to family engagement in the care and protection of children have, in part, been a product of our reluctance to go beyond the presenting unit (however fractured that may be), despite the evidence that family networks are fluid, diverse and rarely geographically specific:
‘do you mean who lives in this house or who is in my family?’ (child's mother, quoted in Morris, 2012:12)
In this chapter family refers to the extended network of the child, and moves away from narrow notions of immediate carers. Family is a contested term; family theorists have argued that new types of relationships have emerged that make traditional notions of family redundant. Intimacy and individualisation have become preferred lens through which to understand relationships. But, for many engaged in family studies, family remains a useful conceptual tool in understanding both how relationships are organised and how they are sustained. It is well documented elsewhere that much family-minded policy and practice is in reality concerned with parents (in particular mothers) (Morris et al, 2009). Understanding how families are understood in policy and then seeking to locate the social work practice responses in this analysis allows us to consider if our responses to vulnerable families are adequate, or indeed appropriate. By tracing the changing discourses that inform family-minded practice the challenges for families in navigating professional terrain become apparent, and provoke questions about how policy and practice may, at least in part, generate the very problems they profess to address.