Child Protection

An Introduction

Chris Beckett

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781446224328
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Trabajo social

Praise for the First Edition:

`All readers will be drawn to the style of the book as well as its content. The structure will make sure that it is not just a "one-off", being read as part of a course of study, but a book which is used frequently as a source of reference? - Child Abuse Review

The Second Edition of this best-selling textbook provides students and practitioners with a broad introduction to, and critical analysis of, the complex issues involved in child protection work. Beckett unpacks these complexities in a clear and engaging way, all the time encouraging reflection and debate through such features as case examples and interactive exercises.

The book is fully comprehensive, considering key topics such as: the consequences for children of abuse and neglect; the reasons why some adults abuse and neglect children; the personal challenges involved in doing child protection work; and the organizational framework within which child protection work takes place. Other key features of this thoroughly revised Second Edition include:

" Fully updated content: the book has been revised to incorporate new literature, research, legal and policy developments, including the recent Working Together guidelines

" Two new chapters: these comprise a chapter on domestic violence in families, and a chapter on bringing about change

" Interprofessional appeal: the author addresses all the professionals involved in child protection work, ensuring relevance across a range of disciplines and professions.

The new edition of this highly successful textbook will be required reading for students studying social work and allied subjects, and an essential resource for all professionals involved in child protection work.

Chris Beckett is based at the Division of Social Work and Social Policy, Anglia Ruskin University. He is the author of three best-selling SAGE textbooks: Human Growth and Development; Values and Ethics in Social Work (with Andrew Maynard); Essential Theory for Social Work Practice.

Part I

CHILD PROTECTION WORK

---

1	Different Perspectives

---

• The modern child protection system
• The historical context in Britain
• International comparisons
• Cross-cultural complexities
• Different disciplines
• Safeguarding children

Children – and especially small children – rely on the adults who care for them to meet both their physical needs and their needs for security, safety, love and a sense of belonging. But children are often harmed by those who they rely upon for protection. Occasionally they are killed. More often they are injured, or used for sexual gratification, or treated in ways that may not do any obvious physical harm, but which have long-term emotional and psychological consequences. More often still they are just poorly cared for to the point that their basic needs go unmet, whether this is because their carers are indifferent to these needs, unable to recognize them, or simply too preoccupied with their own. I suspect that every society, at every stage in history, has recognized that this is a problem about which ‘something should be done’.

What is comparatively new though is a professional child protection system of the type which now exists in Britain, the USA and many other countries, set up and regulated by the state and expected not only to respond to specific incidents of child abuse and neglect, but also to anticipate and prevent serious harm being done to children. It is a system which provides work to thousands of social workers, doctors, nurses, judges, lawyers, police officers, civil servants, academics and many others, and a system upon which high expectations are placed by the community at large. It is this system that is the subject of Part I of this book. This chapter will give a broad overview of the subject. Chapter 2 looks in more detail at the multi-professional system as it is defined – and has recently been redefined – in the particular context of England and Wales. Chapter 3 looks more closely at what the professionals who operate the system can do to bring about change on behalf of children. Chapter 4 looks at what is entailed for, and required of, the individual worker.

The modern child protection system

In the next chapter I will describe the child protection system that operates in England and Wales. Many of the essential elements of that system are similar to those that exist in other jurisdictions in the industrialized world. Briefly, the system and its social context include the following:

1. All agencies involved in working with children or parents are expected to share information about children who may be at risk. This obligation generally overrides each agency’s duty of confidentiality towards its service users.
2. Central government provides detailed guidelines as to the duties of the various agencies and the arrangements for them to co-operate.
3. At the local level agencies are required to establish collaborative structures within which to co-ordinate and develop local child protection strategies and procedures.
4. Social work agencies and the police have a joint responsibility to investigate incidents of abuse.
5. Social work agencies have legal duties to investigate families causing concern and, if necessary, to seek powers from the courts allowing them to intervene and impose solutions, which can include temporarily or permanently removing a child from her carers.
6. Although the day-to-day running of the child protection system is not of huge interest to the general public, its perceived failures cause widespread concern. These perceived failures include both incidents where the system has failed to prevent children from dying, or suffer serious mis-treatment at the hands of carers, and incidents where the system is seen to have behaved overzealously and interfered needlessly in families.

As I have said, I will leave more detailed discussion of the system to the next chapter. For the present I simply want to draw your attention to the fact that in England and Wales at present there is a particular system, and a particular way of looking at child protection. It has not always been so, and it is not so in other places. We should bear in mind that the system as it now operates is only one of many possible approaches. Reminding ourselves of this enables us to remain open to the possibility of changes and improvements.

The following, for instance, are objections that might legitimately be raised to the system I have described:

• Historically it would have been the extended family and the community that dealt with abusive parenting. Some might argue that the more the state intervenes in family life, the less the extended family and the community become involved, so that, in the long run, society’s informal protective networks are weakened. If concerned neighbours can pick up their telephones and report their concerns about a child, they may well feel they have discharged their responsibilities to that child just by doing this. If the option of reporting it to a professional agency was not available, they might feel that they needed to take more action themselves. Though not writing specifically about child protection, David Schwartz expresses this general anxiety about the professionalization of care as follows:

Each year more of the world passes out of the sphere of the vernacular and into the sphere of systems. Mom-and-Pop stores fall to chain convenience stores, the neighborhood doctor and midwife become employees of health maintenance organizations, and small-scale personal efforts to help people become human service corporations. (Schwartz, 1997: 36)

• The child protection system is too much about monitoring and policing and not enough about helping and supporting. The preoccupation with information gathering erodes privacy and alienates families (see Munro, 2004, who also questions whether the information sharing that would be made possible through a national database would actually increase the effectiveness of children’s services).
• Most of the abuse and neglect that is detected occurs in poor families. One of the main factors in abuse and neglect is poverty and social exclusion (as will be discussed in Chapter 12). It is possible to argue that social workers and other welfare professionals provide a fig leaf for structural injustice by making people into ‘cases’ and their problems look like individual failings, and that the inter-agency child protection system, constitutes a form of state surveillance to which the poor are subjected, but which more powerful members of society generally avoid.
• The child protection system in Britain has largely been shaped by a series of public inquiries about child deaths – and by newspapers and public opinion demanding that child deaths should not happen again. Trying to predict child deaths, though, is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Arguably the whole system has been shaped by a goal which will never be reached. (For further discussion on this, see Chapter 14.)
• The system is geared towards detecting abuse, but much less thought has been given to how best to help abused children or their families once their abuse has been detected, or to whether the services now offered are actually always helping. For example, in recent years increasing numbers of children have been taken into public care. But the care system is not always successful, often failing to provide children with the security and stability that they need. (For more on this see Chapter 13.)

All these arguments, I would suggest, have some validity. The difficulty of course is trying to construct an alternative system that retains the benefits of the present system without suffering from any of the disadvantages. The system will probably always be an uneasy compromise between equally important but mutually contradictory objectives.

To make things more complicated, the system is very much a political creation which means that it is not just a compromise between mutually contradictory objectives in terms of the needs of children and families, but a compromise which also has to take into account the needs of politicians and the demands of various interest groups; for example, all governments feel under pressure to improve public services, including the child protection system, but all governments are also under pressure to limit public expenditure. This can result in a kind of tokenism in which public services, such as the child protection system, are periodically required to go through the motions of implementing changes which are trumpeted as revolutionary, though in actual fact they are not provided with the resources that would be needed for these changes to be anything other than cosmetic ones. Thus Eileen Munro and Martin Calder criticize the political agenda set out in the Green Paper Every Child Matters (DfES, 2003), as follows:

[The government] want to shift practitioners’ focus towards preventative services; this has the logical implication of shifting the focus away from its current emphasis on child protection. The consequences of this have not been explicitly addressed, leaving it to agencies and individual practitioners to grapple with the inconsistency of being told to focus on family support without taking attention away from child protection. (Munro and Calder, 2005: 444, their emphasis)

The historical context in Britain

Ideas about how children should be treated by adults, and about the community’s responsibilities towards children, have changed over the centuries, although this is not to say that in the past adults were not concerned to protect children from harm. The fact that it was a serious matter to harm children in Biblical times, 2000 years ago, seems to me to be illustrated, for example, by the following famous verse:

And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea. (Mark 9: 42)

It would be impossible to establish the prevalence of child abuse in historic times with any degree of certainty, since even today much abuse is never discovered. Attitudes as to what constitute abuse and what constitute appropriate chastisement have also changed, as illustrated by another Biblical quote: ‘He that spareth his rod hateth his son’ (Proverbs 13: 24. By contrast in several countries today any kind of physical punishment is now illegal while, in England and Wales, section 58 of the 2004 Children Act spells out that ‘battery of a child cannot be justified on the ground that it constituted reasonable punishment’.)

Child protection as a distinct state-sponsored professional activity is a relatively recent phenomenon. During the nineteenth century the industrial revolution in Britain led to the growth of big cities and new state institutions began to appear. It was in 1856, for instance, that it became mandatory for the first time for local authorities to set up police forces. Attitudes to child welfare also changed over the course of the century. Some indication of the distance we have travelled in Britain is given by the fact that the 1833 Factory Act prohibited children under nine years old from working in factories, but the employers of nine-year-olds could still quite legally require them to work a 48-hour week.

State regulation of childcare began with efforts to regulate the practice of ‘baby-farming’ (essentially private fostering), common in the nineteenth century. A series of pieces of legislation, beginning in 1872 with the Infant Life Protection Act, laid down requirements for baby-farmers to register with local authorities and to meet certain minimum standards. In 1889, the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act empowered police to search premises for children thought to be in danger and to remove them if necessary to a place of safety (a power which continues to exist under section 46 of the 1989 Children Act). Meanwhile, in the 1880s, the precursor organizations to the modern NSPCC – the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the first child protection agency in England – had begun to take shape.

However, although what we now call the ‘welfare state’ had been developing over the previous century, the so-called ‘post-war settlement’, the period after 1945, is generally seen as representing a sea change in welfare provision in Britain. The establishment of the National Health Service is probably the best-known achievement of that period, but another change was the requirement of local authorities under the 1948 Children Act to set up Children’s Departments employing welfare officers. These Child Welfare Officers – children and family social workers – were subsequently incorporated, along with welfare officers for the elderly and others, into the new generic Social Services departments in the 1970s. At time of writing, in 2006, Social Services departments are once again being broken up across England and Wales, following the Every Child Matters Green Paper and section 17 of the 2004 Children Act, and social work services (referred to as Local Authority children’s social care) are being placed, along with Education, within the remit of new Children’s Services Directors.

During the 1960s, there was a growing awareness of the prevalence of physical abuse of children (‘the battered baby syndrome’ as it was originally described). The death of Maria Colwell in 1973 was the first of many cases which brought child protection into the spotlight and the first of many to be presented in the media as failures by gullible or incompetent professionals. Following the public inquiry into this case, much of the framework was put in place that we would still recognize as the modern multi-agency child protection system. Public inquiries from then on emphasized again and again the importance of detecting indicators of abuse, improving communications between agencies and acting decisively to protect children from harm. But in 1987, there was a different kind of outcry about the activities of child protection professionals:

If previous inquiries demonstrated that welfare professionals, particularly social workers, failed to protect the lives and interests of children and intervened too little too late into the private family, the concerns focussed around Cleveland seemed to demonstrate that professionals … paediatricians as well as social workers, failed to recognise the rights of parents and intervened too soon and in too heavy-handed a way into the family. (Parton, 1991: 79)

The 1989 Children Act (which actually came into effect in 1991) was supposed to strike a new balance between support and compulsory intervention in families. ‘The most important and far-reaching reform this century of the law on children’, said The Times newspaper at the time, ‘a fundamental shift from the adversarial legal system. The new emphasis is away from courts imposing solutions or orders and towards parents, relatives and local authorities working in partnership …’ (The Times, 8 October 1991). But in fact, the expected fundamental shift did not take place (McKeigue and Beckett, 2004) and, after an initial drop, the number of children annually made subject to Care Orders rapidly increased, tripling over the period 1992–2004, in spite of various e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I CHILD PROTECTION WORK
• PART II CHILD MALTREATMENT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
• PART III CAUSES AND CONTEXTS
• PART IV PROBLEMS AND DILEMMAS
• References
• Index