Thinking About Child Protection Practice

This book presents in-depth, candid case studies that are designed to allow someone studying child protection to understand the complicated, challenging situations that occur in the field. The contributors cover eight common situations that practitioners face, including working with assessing risk, managing different professional perspectives, and handling uncooperative clients. The detailed analysis they provide will help students understand why particular decisions are made, and how practitioners can overcome similar predicaments at work through reflective practice.

How do practitioners step up to the professional challenge of keeping children safe? Leading author Harry Ferguson draws on his own research, personal experience and real-life case studies to challenge the way we think about child protection. This highly original and engaging book captures the daily reality of practice within life's most personal spaces, and offers a rare insight into the lived experience of working with vulnerable children, their parents and other carers. An inspiring declaration of the need for a new, intimate approach to child protection, this ground-breaking book lays the foundations of skilful, authoritative practice. It is a must for Social Work student and practitioners within this challenging field.

′Effective Child Protection is a significant contribution to child welfare practice and policy...Munro offers a pathway to achieving better outcomes for children and families who are recipients of child protection services′ - Children and Youth Services Review Praise for the First Edition: `The book makes the fully justified claim [that] it will be essential reading for professionals undergoing qualifying and post-qualifying training. It is to be hoped that it will enjoy an even wider readership′ - Child Abuse Review This new edition is essential reading for anyone concerned with improving child protection practice. Building on the strengths of the first edition, it provides a deeper understanding of how practice judgements and decisions can be improved in child protection work. Updates include: - an account of how intuition, emotion, and analytic thinking are combined in practice - an analysis of how the nature of the task determines what combination is needed - an updated chapter on how we can detect errors - new material on how organisations can promote good reasoning skills - a simpler way to understand risk assessment instruments. Illustrated with detailed case studies throughout, it will be invaluable reading for students, researchers and practitioners in all areas of child protection, including social work, education, health and policing. Eileen Munro is a Reader in Social Policy at the London School of Economics, specialising in child protection. Other publications include Child Protection (SAGE 2006).

The state is increasingly experienced as both intrusive and neglectful, particularly by those living in poverty, leading to loss of trust and widespread feelings of alienation and disconnection. Against this tense background, this innovative book argues that child protection policies and practices have become part of the problem, rather than ensuring children’s well-being and safety. Building on the ideas in the best-selling Re-imagining child protection and drawing together a wide range of social theorists and disciplines, the book: • Challenges existing notions of child protection, revealing their limits; • Ensures that the harms children and families experience are explored in a way that acknowledges the social and economic contexts in which they live; • Explains how the protective capacities within families and communities can be mobilised and practices of co-production adopted; • Places ethics and human rights at the centre of everyday conversations and practices.

"The timing of the publication with the revised Working Together guidelines could not be more advantageous. This book is a unique and important contribution to child care literature. No agency should be without." - Child Abuse Review Professionals concerned with the protection of children face many challenges. This work demands knowledge from several disciplines, a wide variety of skills, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The editors, Howard Dubowitz, a pediatrician, and Diane DePanfilis, a social worker, together with over 70 experts in this field offer what is known about how best to work with maltreated children and their families, in a very practical, concise, and user-friendly way. Structured to follow the life of a case from the time a report of child maltreatment is made through the various pathways in the child protection system, this edited volume synthesizes the best practice principles for responding to reports of child abuse and neglect; engaging children and other family members in intervention; developing cross-cultural practice competencies; assessing risk, evaluating safety, and conducting family assessments; defining outcomes and planning intervention; evaluating risk reduction; and making permanency decisions; and discusses the unique legal, medical, ethical, and other practice issues that work in the child protection field involves. Professionals facing tough dilemmas in practice should find valuable guidance in these pages.

Protecting Children in Time provides a highly original analysis of the origins and development of the taken-for-granted notion that it is possible through social intervention to protect children from avoidable harm and even death, to protect children in time . By using case-studies which span the past 120 years of 'modern' practices and drawing on the work of leading social theorists of modernity and risk society it provides a new way of thinking about constructions of child abuse as a social problem and child protection as a late-modern expert system and experience. It proposes new ways of conceptualizing relationships between professionals, children at risk and families and deepens our understanding of what effective interventions have to involve.

Challenging Child Protection offers a ground-breaking new perspective which will illuminate and improve the professional understanding and practice of social workers and child protection workers. Taking a fresh look at the principles underlying child protection, this book provides a thought-provoking analysis of the evidence base which underpins professional understanding and intervention. It outlines the ways in which agencies have worked to prevent child abuse and neglect and traces key changes in UK policy, as well as situating these amid wider trends in Europe. With contributions from a wide variety of disciplines, including philosophy and anthropology, this is a uniquely diverse collection of academic perspectives. This book challenges our conceptions of child protection and encourages readers to think critically about why children are harmed by adults, how society views child abuse and how this informs practice.