Child Protection and Family Support

Tensions, Contradictions and Possibilities

Nigel Parton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134766468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Salud general

Child protection and family support is a major social issue and there is a continuing debate about how policies and practices in relation to child protection integrate with those in family support and child welfare more generally. Prompted in part by the Audit Commission and the publication of the Department of Health Research studies in Child Protection, it is the key issue facing all child welfare agencies. While it is agreed that there needs to be a rebalancing between child protection and family support there is a real fear amongst managers and practitioners if things go wrong, subjecting them to public inquiry and media contempt. Child Protection and Family Support brings together a range of distinguished researchers and commentators to analyze the nature of the issue and possible ways forward. It draws on recent research case studies; policy makers, managers and practitioners in social work and child welfare agencies.

Chapter 1
Child protection and family support
Current debates and future prospects

Nigel Parton

A major debate has recently emerged in the United Kingdom about how policies and practices in relation to child protection integrate with and are supported by policies and practices that are concerned with family support and child welfare more generally. Increasingly it seems there is a great tension between the two and that this is posing major problems for policy makers, managers and practitioners in child welfare agencies. This debate and how it is responded to will be the key issue for all concerned over the next few years.

The purpose of this opening chapter is to provide a very personal series of reflections on the current debate and state of knowledge concerning child protection and family support, and thereby to consider the nature of the possibilities that are currently opening up for policy makers, managers and practitioners. At the same time I shall also be considering a number of issues and themes that fellow contributors will, from their different perspectives, be considering and analysing in greater depth in their respective chapters.

In many respects these current debates are the latest attempt to come to terms, in a policy and practice sense, with the issue of child abuse. For there is no doubt that since its modern (re)emergence as a social problem, child abuse has been subject to considerable media, public and political interest and debate. It has been constructed as one of the major social problems of our times and perhaps the major priority for managers and practitioners in the child welfare field. For those of us who were in practice in the early/mid 1970s it was as if the discovery of the phenomenon and the death and subsequent inquiry into the case of Maria Colwell had an impact on what we did and the way we should be working well beyond concerns related to the ‘battered baby syndrome’. There is no doubt that one of the consequences was that we started to ‘see’ practice in quite new ways and that as a result some children were helped who previously may not have been. However, this has been at a cost (Parton, 1985). Recent years have been characterised by often heated and contradictory debate about the nature of the problem(s) and what should be done. As a consequence those who are given responsibility for doing something about child abuse, particularly social workers, have found themselves practising in an area which is increasingly complex and ambiguous.

What I want to suggest here is that the complexities and ambiguities have reached a new level of intensity. While new opportunities are opening up, the situation is also subject to numerous tensions and contradictions. It is more important than ever, therefore, to be realistic and honest about the current situation and what can be achieved.

In 1991 I had a book published called Governing the Family: Child Care, Child Protection and the State (Parton, 1991). Its primary purpose was to analyse the particular influences and concerns that had informed policy development in the areas of child care and child protection particularly during the 1980s, and their culmination in the Children Act 1989. One of my essential arguments was that there had been an increasing tension between policies and practices whose central concerns were child welfare and parallel policies and practices whose concerns were child protection. I saw the Children Act as trying to provide a new legislative framework for reconstructing the balances between these two agendas, and thereby laying the foundations for a new consensus. A key part of the argument was that while the reforms were centrally informed by the earlier Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and DHSS research on decision making in child care (DHSS, 1985a), the Short Report (Social Services Committee, 1984) and the Review of the Child Care Law (DHSS, 1985b), the essential political momentum and the catalyst for change was child abuse inquiries—particularly Beckford (London Borough of Brent, 1985) and Cleveland (Secretary of State for Social Services, 1988), and the increasing public opprobrium coming via the media and articulated by the polity (Aldridge, 1994; Franklin and Parton, 1991). This was most evident in a close reading of reports in Hansard Parliamentary debates about the Children Act. It was concerns about child protection which were the critical and dominant themes.

At the end of Governing the Family I tentatively looked to the future and set out two possible scenarios, one essentially framed by child welfare and the other by child protection. In the former, policy and practice would be driven by an emphasis on partnership, participation, prevention, family support and a positive rethink of the purposes and uses of care. The priority would be on helping parents and children in the community in a supportive way and would keep notions of policing, surveillance and coercive interventions to a minimum. In effect policy and practice would be driven by Part III and Section 17 of the Act. The other scenario was that it would be priorities about child protection which would dominate—in effect Part V and Section 47 in particular—and concerns about the threshold for state intervention based on ‘significant harm and the likelihood of significant harm’. While I hedged my bets, I suggested it would be the latter which would win the day—much against my better judgement, for I am a gr+eat supporter of the Act and what I know its key drafters were trying to achieve. However, while they were perhaps inclined towards optimism, I was inclined more towards pessimism. My pessimism was informed by: (a) a recognition that the changes had been wrought primarily because of public inquiries into child abuse; and (b) the fact that in effect the legislation was being introduced in the context of a very hostile climate. As I shall argue below, we must never forget that this is a very insignificant piece of legislation when put alongside changes in the economy, increases in social inequality, changes in social security, changes in local government more generally, the legislation in relation to schools, health, and so on (Barker, 1996; Morrison, 1996). All of these have direct and indirect impacts on day-to-day child care policy and practice.

What is now generally recognised is that it is concerns about child protection that have been dominant and that these have had deleterious outcomes particularly for the children and families involved. In effect the central philosophy and principles of the Children Act have not been fully developed in day-to-day policy and practice. Not only are the family support aspirations and sections of the Act being implemented partially and not prioritised, but the child protection system is overloaded and not coping with the increased demands made of it. While child protection is the dominating concern and this is framing child welfare more generally, increasingly it is felt that too many cases are being dragged into the child protection net and that as a consequence the few who might require such interventions are in danger of being missed. It is now quite clear that just four years after the implementation of the Act we are again having to reconsider the issues that the legislation was meant to address. Concerns about child protection have become all-pervasive to the point where child care and child welfare policies and priorities have been fundamentally re-ordered and re-fashioned in its guise. What we are currently witnessing is a major debate about whether and how policy and practice can be reframed so that it is consistent with the original intentions of the Children Act 1989.

THE AUDIT COMMISSION REPORT AND MESSAGES FROM RESEARCH

The two key catalysts for the current debates were the publication of the Audit Commission report (1994) Seen But Not Heard: Coordinating Community Child Health and Social Services for Children in Need and the launch by the Department of Health of Child Protection: Messages from Research (Dartington Social Research Unit, 1995). The Audit Commission report suggested that the aspirations and central aims of the Children Act were not being achieved and it made a number of recommendations to try to move policies and practices forward. It argued that children were not receiving the help they needed because local authority and community child health services were poorly planned and coordinated, resulting in a large part of the £2 billion expenditure being wasted on families who did not need support. Central to the report's recommendations was that local authorities and the health service should produce strategic children's services plans to target resources more effectively. The focus should be on identifying and assessing need, then producing flexible and non-stigmatising services, with a particular emphasis on the role of care managers who would coordinate provision. More emphasis should be placed on prevention and less on reactive interventions and reliance on expensive residential services.

The problems in developing the family support aspirations of the Children Act have also been identified in a number of other studies (Aldgate, Tunstill and McBeath, 1992; Giller, 1993; Aldgate, McBeath, Ozolins and Tunstill, 1994; SSI, 1995a; Colton, Drury and Williams, 1995) and explicitly identified by the Children Act Report 1993 (DOH, 1994) which noted that:

A broadly consistent and somewhat worrying picture is emerging. In general, progress towards full implementation of Section 17 of the Children Act has been slow. Further work is still needed to provide across the country a range of family services aimed at preventing families reaching the point of breakdown. Some authorities are still finding it difficult to move from a reactive social policing role to a more proactive partnership role with families.

(para 2.39)

Significantly, the central themes and recommendations in the Audit Commission report reflected and were in part informed by the findings and conclusions of a number of major Department of Health-funded research projects (Birchall and Hallett, 1995; Cleaver and Freeman, 1995; Farmer and Owen, 1995; Ghate and Spencer, 1995; Gibbons, Conroy and Bell, 1995; Gibbons, Gallagher, Bell and Gordon, 1995; Hallett, 1995; Thoburn, Lewis and Shemmings, 1995) and there is no doubt that the launch of the research overview document Child Protection: Messages from Research (Dartington Social Research Unit, 1995) on 21 June 1995 has proved something of a watershed in thinking about child welfare policy and practice. In particular it has opened up a major debate about priorities and the appropriate balance between family support and child protection.

The significance of Messages from Research is indicated by the way the document was launched by the Minister on behalf of the Department of Health (Crompton, 1996). While previous childcare research overview documents (DHSS, 1985a; DOH, 1991) had a foreword written by Sir William Utting, the then Chief Inspector of the Social Services Inspectorate, this overview document (Dartington Social Research Unit, 1995) had a foreword and was launched by John Bowis, the then Minister. Similarly the launch grabbed the imagination of the media in ways that were previously unheard of with child care research. It was one of the major news and feature items on the TV and radio on 21 June 1995 and received considerable coverage in the news and editorial comment in the national press the following day. The headlines carrying the story on 22 June included: ‘Social Workers Add to Family Distress in Sex Abuse Cases’ (The Times); ‘Social Workers Blamed for Family Break-ups’ (Daily Telegraph); ‘Stop Witch-hunts that Split Families’ (Daily Express); ‘Social Workers Facing Crackdown’ (Daily Mail); ‘Social Workers Need to Use “Lighter Touch”’ (Guardian); and ‘Death-knell Sounds on Child Abuse Inquiries’ (Independent). In many respects the publicity afforded the overview document and the ministerial launch were more akin to the publication of a child abuse public inquiry, and, as with public inquiries, focused on the activities and negative interventions of social workers. As these headlines illustrate, there is a real danger that practitioners and managers will experience the research as adding to their sense of being embattled, subject to misunderstanding and being expected to walk a very fine dividing line. Clearly, however, the opportunity seriously to reconsider current priorities has been opened up.

The decision to fund the research programme in the late 1980s was a direct consequence of the fallout from the Cleveland Inquiry (Secretary of State, 1988) and the apparent paucity of knowledge in the area of child abuse and the manifest confusion in the reactions of the investigative agencies. The programmes of research aimed to explore different aspects of child abuse that would, in combination, help to provide a more comprehensive assessment of current practices. The primary focus was the processes and outcomes of child protection interventions.

Messages from Research argued that any ‘incident has to be seen in context before the extent of its harm can be assessed and appropriate interventions agreed’ (Dartington Social Research Unit, 1995, 53, original emphasis), and that the studies demonstrate that ‘with the exception of a few severe assaults and some sexual maltreatment’ (53) long-term difficulties for children seldom follow from a single abusive event or incident—rather they are more likely to be a consequence of living in an unfavourable environment, particularly one which is low in warmth and high in criticism. Only in a small proportion of cases in the research was abuse seen as extreme and warranting more immediate and formal child protection interventions to protect the child. It is suggested that if we put ‘to one side the severe cases’ (19), the most deleterious situations in terms of longer-term outcomes for children are those of emotional neglect (20) where the primary concern is the parenting style that fails to compensate for the inevitable deficiencies that become manifest in the course of the twenty years or so it takes to bring up a child. Unfortunately, the research suggested that these are just the situations where the current operation of the child protection system seemed to be least successful. What was demonstrated was that while there was little evidence that children were being missed and suffering harm unnecessarily at the hands of their parents, as implied by most child abuse inquiries, and was thus ‘successful’ according to a narrow definition of child protection, this was at a cost. Many children and parents felt alienated and angry, and there was an over-emphasis on forensic concerns, with far too much time spent on investigations, and a failure to develop longer-term coordinated treatment, counselling and preventati...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES AND TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• SERIES EDITOR'S PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1: CHILD PROTECTION AND FAMILY SUPPORT CURRENT DEBATES AND FUTURE PROSPECTS
• CHAPTER 2: THE RE-FOCUSING OF CHILDREN'S SERVICES THE CONTRIBUTION OF RESEARCH
• CHAPTER 3: IMPLEMENTING THE FAMILY SUPPORT CLAUSES OF THE 1989 CHILDREN ACT LEGISLATIVE, PROFESSIONAL AND ORGANISATIONAL OBSTACLES
• CHAPTER 4: POLICING MINORITY CHILD-REARING PRACTICES IN AUSTRALIA THE CONSISTENCY OF ‘CHILD ABUSE’
• CHAPTER 5: RELATING OUTCOMES TO OBJECTIVES IN CHILD PROTECTION POLICY
• CHAPTER 6: INTRODUCING NON-PUNITIVE APPROACHES INTO CHILD PROTECTION LEGAL ISSUES
• CHAPTER 7: CAN FILTERING PROCESSES BE RATIONALISED?
• CHAPTER 8: CHILDREN ABUSED WITHIN THE CARE SYSTEM DO CURRENT REPRESENTATION PROCEDURES OFFER THE CHILD PROTECTION AND THE FAMILY SUPPORT?
• CHAPTER 9: PROTECTION AND CHILD WELFARE STRIKING THE BALANCE
• CHAPTER 10: NEED, RISK AND SIGNIFICANT HARM
• CHAPTER 11: DELIVERING FAMILY SUPPORT ISSUES AND THEMES IN SERVICE DEVELOPMENT
• CHAPTER 12: PARTNERSHIP WITH SERVICE USERS IN CHILD PROTECTION AND FAMILY SUPPORT
• CHAPTER 13: PUTTING CHILD AND FAMILY SUPPORT AND PROTECTION INTO PRACTICE