Child Protection, Families and Society

The modern child protection system began around forty years ago. This was when area child protection committees were set up to improve coordination between services and the 'child abuse register' was created - a new alert system for professionals to help them identify high-risk children. Since then the system has undergone many changes but progress in protecting children from maltreatment has been very uneven. Despite a range of government policies to improve parenting it seems that families are getting worse.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that families with children are under more stress than ever and deemed in greater need of support. Teachers are increasingly concerned about their pupils' emotional and behavioural difficulties and often have to deal with children who seem very troubled and present a variety of problems. Schools are finding that the threshold for referral to children's services has been raised and more family problems have to be dealt with by the school. At the same time, mental health services for children and young people are struggling to respond to the increasing number of referrals they receive. There are also political pressures on children's services which often arise when the system has apparently failed to deliver. More children are being taken into care.

Although statistics show that the rate of care applications has risen in recent years there is considerable variation between authorities. Research has shown that care applications rose from 2008 onwards due to the Baby Peter effect but this was due to corrective action and did not amount to a lowering of the legal threshold Cafcass Care Study into care applications.

While some children's services are well staffed and maintain good standards of practice others are struggling. Some in England are in crisis, particularly those given ratings of 'inadequate' when inspected for safeguarding. If these problems are to be tackled it requires social workers and managers with a much higher level of critical thinking and practice than exists in the current child protection system.

One source of these problems is the child protection system itself. The over-riding aim of any child protection system is to identify and reduce the incidence of child maltreatment in society but some parents find that the system now works in a way which can be too intrusive and puts additional stress on them. Public concern about the way children's services are being run comes from all sections of society. Judges have even ruled that in a number of cases local authorities have acted unlawfully and have therefore awarded damages to parents.

Poor social work practice often arises out of local authorities' misunderstanding, or deliberately misreading, of their statutory responsibilities. One way of getting services back on track is to recognise the fact that the law is the defining mandate of child protection work. However, the profession resists this idea and counters it with the argument that social workers have an ethical duty of care, in addition to their legal mandate. It also asserts that informal interventions are always better than formal ones, despite the fact that the Children Act 1989 does not create a presumption one way or the other. Now that parents are becoming more litigious and family courts more transparent it is essential that all social workers have a sound understanding of the extent and limits of their legal powers and duties.

The level of political debate about state intervention into family life has sunk into a free-for-all where everything is fiercely contested. There is no shared understanding about what children's social workers are required to do for society. Campaigning groups argue that not enough is being done to root out child abuse in society. On the other hand, some academics fail to acknowledge that the social work task sometimes requires a reactive response to child cruelty giving social workers an ethical duty to spot families needing a firmer, more persuasive style of working.

The fear and paranoia in society towards children's social workers is everywhere. The fact that some parents have suffered injustice at the hands of social workers, or even permanent loss of their children to care, makes all parents feel anxious. Headlines proclaim an increase in the number of child protection investigations but there are serious doubts about whether these are meeting the required professional standard.

Good practice requires skilled, knowledgeable and experienced social workers who are good at handling their emotions and making fine judgements. Professional judgement is informed by both intuitive understanding and professional knowledge. Unfortunately, the present arrangements for conducting assessments are sometimes unsatisfactory and the dysfunctional nature of the employing organisation may be partly to blame. If social workers are swept along by their emotional need to support parents the safety of children can become a secondary consideration - but if swept along by the child rescue lobby the fundamentals of respect for the parents can become a secondary consideration.

The capacity of social workers to make comprehensive risk assessments should be taken as a fundamental part of the job. It is therefore difficult to make sense of the continuing level of child protection errors - both the 'false negative' and 'false positive' attributions. Often the issues that social workers struggle with are due to difficulties in achieving good inter-professional communication and clarity about the precise nature of medical evidence of harm and risk - which can make it difficult for social workers to use their legal powers correctly. However, sound decision-making should also be based on an in-depth analysis of family relationships, an understanding of whether parents have the capacity to change, and a commitment to providing the kind of support that would promote the child's wellbeing and healthy development.

Social workers are required to combine the dual roles of family support and child protection. However, there is often uncertainty about the difference between 'child protection' and 'safeguarding' and how to achieve good practice in meeting a child's 'welfare' needs while also keeping in mind the threshold for 'significant harm'. Unless social workers are sufficiently skilled and experienced there may be insufficient clarity about whether social work intervention in the family home is achieving the formal objective of child protection. Priority must therefore be given to improving the organisational arrangements for the formal assessment of risk (section 47 investigations and comprehensive assessments of the family) and ensuring that statutory interventions to protect children at greatest risk also respect the legal rights of parents.

Hilary Searing