Effective Child Protection

Eileen Munro

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526464743
• eBook ISBN: 9781526464750
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Eileen Munro, author of the seminal Munro Review, returns in this fully revised and updated third edition. With new chapters on ?Child Protection Agencies as Complex Adaptive Systems? and ?How organisations can support more effective practice?, this new edition shifts its focus from individual workers to look at the critical role that organisationsplay in child protection, and how individuals are affectedby the complex enterprise of people, processes, cultures and agencies.It remainsan essential guideto strengthening analytic and intuitive skills to improve children?s safety.

1 Introduction

Child protection work inevitably involves uncertainty, ambiguity and fallibility. The knowledge base is limited, predictions about the child’s future welfare are imperfect, and there is no definitive way of balancing the conflicting rights of parents and children. The public rightly expect high standards from child protection workers in safeguarding children, but achieving them is proving problematic.

All advanced industrial countries have developed some type of child protection system. These societies recognise a child’s right to a minimum level of care, protected from the worst excesses of parental abuse or neglect. At the same time, the privacy of the family and the rights of the individual adult are also highly valued, so that child protection workers have to walk a tightrope, balancing the conflicting rights of the family members. Moreover, the aim is not just to minimise the danger to children but to maximise their welfare. Removal from the birth family may increase their safety but harm their overall development. In all but the most extreme cases, the birth family is seen as the best place for a child to be nurtured. This affects the way allegations of abuse are dealt with. Professionals know that the parents they are investigating today are likely to be their partners in future efforts to improve family functioning. The way the initial contact is handled has long-term effects on the family’s relationships with professionals.

In assessing a child’s safety, accuracy is a crucial goal. Ideally, professionals want to be able to classify parents correctly as abusive or not, with the minimum of distress to those wrongly accused. They then want to manage the risk to children in a way that maximises their safety while also promoting their healthy development. Most societies recognise that birth families are the best place for children, so helping parents provide safe enough care is valued as a way of reducing the need to remove children. Again, judgement is required in deciding whether the families are safe enough and accuracy is the goal. Reality falls far short of such high goals because of our limited knowledge and the need to work with probabilities not certainties. Professionals face strong pressures from the wider society. The image of a vulnerable child suffering pain and fear at the hands of their carers stirs up deep feelings of horror and outrage. Equally, the idea of powerful officials invading the privacy of the family and interrogating us on the intensely personal issue of our competence as parents provokes anger and resistance.

It is hard to imagine circumstances that pose a greater challenge to reasoning skills: limited knowledge, uncertainty, high emotions, time pressures and conflicting values. It is not surprising, therefore, that so much effort and money has been poured into research to improve professionals’ knowledge and skills. How to improve expertise is, however, much disputed. Many initiatives to improve professionals’ effectiveness have entailed increasingly specific procedures, guidelines and risk assessment schedules. Front-line workers have mixed views about these, with many feeling that they undervalue the interpersonal skills of empathy and intuition needed to relate to parents and children. The issue is often presented as a stark dichotomy between objective and subjective knowledge, science and art, or formal reasoning and intuition. This leads to a sterile and often bitter conflict.

My own understanding of the problems has evolved substantially as I have had more experience of the work and read the academic literature. I began from an initial position of thinking that more formalisation was the path to follow to realising this needed to be balanced with valuing human judgement and skill. More recently, I’ve moved from thinking the target should be to change the behaviour of front-line workers to appreciating how much their actions were shaped by their context and hence the need to target change in the organisation in order to improve front-line practice. The changes between the three editions of this book reflect this pathway.

The greater focus on the organisation came from learning about complexity and complex social systems. I came across this body of literature in searching for an understanding of a feature of child protection work that puzzled me. During my career, I had seen (and contributed to) a series of intelligent reviews and well-designed reforms leading to major changes in the sector. These had some benefits but were not producing the expected degree of improvement when implemented by the sector. Indeed, new problems were emerging. There was increasing demoralisation within child protection services. By 2010, there were serious workforce recruitment and retention problems so much of the most challenging child protection work was being done by inexperienced staff. The ‘best interest of the child’ was meant to be the prime concern but, for many workers, this seemed to have been replaced with compliance with procedures and meeting performance indicators. The reputation of social work had also worsened with growing criticism of their work, both by the families with whom they worked and the wider society. I was aware that other high income countries also had a pattern of repeated major reviews of their child protection systems so the problems I was observing did not seem limited to England.

I discovered the problems in child protection were not unique but shared by other high-risk sectors such as aviation, engineering and health services. A plane crash, the collapse of a bridge and surgical errors all provoke criticism from the public, putting pressure on the sector to improve the safety standard. As I discuss in Chapter 10, efforts to improve safety in these sectors have moved from a focus on individual human error to seeing the individual as only one causal factor in a complex socio-technological network. A second fundamental shift has occurred more recently in these sectors from a simple to a complex view of the world, with implications for the degree of predictability and control that can be achieved. The implications of this shift for child protection work are explored in this third edition.

This book is concerned with the process rather than the specific content of practice: how we reason and engage with families and each other. It does not, therefore, provide a comprehensive account of current policies or empirical research. Reference will be made, where appropriate, to this literature, but the central concern is to discuss how to use that material to strengthen the quality of help provided to children, young people and their families.

My own professional background is as a social worker in England and this affects the range of practice experience I can draw on. However, the topic of reasoning skills crosses national boundaries and so this book has international relevance. The subject also crosses professional boundaries: all the professions involved in child protection work have an active debate about relevant knowledge and skills, although the balance of support for the different positions varies. The book is, therefore, addressed to child protection practitioners, rather than social workers specifically.

Outline

The next chapter explains what it means to see child protection agencies as complex, adaptive systems and draws out the implications for how we can improve child protection work. Many in child protection will be familiar with systems thinking because it has a long history of being used as a way of understanding how families behave and how they interact with the professional systems in contact with them. However, traditional systems theory was built on a Newtonian vision of an orderly universe where the regularity of causal processes made events, at least in principle, understandable and predictable in terms of universal laws. In the physical sciences and, increasingly, in the social sciences, this is being modified to include complexity theory and a non-linear, or complex, view of causality. This leads to a revised understanding of a systems approach. Bringing this into the child protection world, it challenges the assumptions about our ability to control and predict the work, and has significant implications for how we develop knowledge, manage agencies and support direct work.

Chapter 3 examines the nature of expertise in professional practice. There has long been a debate within the professions about what knowledge and skills could or should be used, and to what extent expertise should be seen as an art or a science. This traditional debate is revisited in the light of research findings from cognitive psychology and neurophysiology that offer insights into our reasoning abilities. Work in psychology challenges the view that analytic and intuitive skills are stark alternatives. Hammond (1996) has argued persuasively that it is more realistic to view human reasoning skills as on a continuum, with the purely formal, analytic methods at one end and blind intuition at the other. In between, intuitive reasoning can be more or less steered by explicit ideas or structured guidelines, and analytic methods may rely, to varying degrees, on intuitive skills in collecting and organising the necessary information. Hammond’s argument is strengthened by research in neurophysiology that shows that the human brain has two methods of processing data – the mainly unconscious, intuitive process, and the deliberative, analytic process. These are located in different parts of the brain but are interconnected (Damasio, 2006). The picture of human abilities as a continuum more closely resembles the experience of child protection workers who draw on all their reasoning skills in the total process of working with an abusive family, using both heart and head as required. It also provides a more accurate representation of the formal methods that are being introduced, few of which can be used without some intuitive skills.

These findings suggest a new framework for setting out the questions about the respective roles of analytic and intuitive reasoning. Following the theme of learning to use each when appropriate, their relative strengths and weaknesses are then examined. The new material in this chapter locates the nature of expertise more firmly in its organisational context rather than simply as an individual attribute.

Seeing the social world as complex has major implications for research and, in particular, for establishing generalisable knowledge so a new chapter, 4, discusses how using research evidence to inform practice is a more complex process than some versions of ‘evidence-based practice’ portray and how the contribution that research can make is more modest than many hope.

Child abuse is a phenomenon shaped by its social context. It is quite unlike a specific disease entity, such as measles, where it can be hoped an understanding of its cause and treatment that has universal application can be developed. A society’s views on child protection are a reflection of its views on children and families generally. Parents’ ability to cope is strongly influenced by the degree of social support given to families. Chapter 5 looks at the range of cultural attitudes to families and the different balance that countries draw between individual autonomy and social solidarity. These views have repercussions on attitudes to abusive parents and whether the emphasis is on rescuing children or supporting their parents to improve their standard of care.

The social dependence of the concept of child abuse has pervasive implications. Chapter 6 examines the problems of defining abuse and the consequences these problems have for research (and amassing a body of empirical knowledge), for policy (and formulating it in a way that can be consistently understood and implemented), and for practice (and the difficulties of getting agreement between the various people involved in a case).

The following three chapters cover the main reasoning tasks of assessment and decision making in child protection. Practitioners increasingly have some formal assistance for the major reasoning tasks ranging from actuarial tools to frameworks for guided professional judgement and it is valuable for them to understand these frameworks’ underlying evidence, logic and probability reasoning. There is a range of reasons why practitioners and agencies need to understand the tools they are using. First, a major omission in risk assessment instruments is that the concept of risk has lost its original neutral meaning of future possibilities and become associated with negative possibilities only. People talk of the risk of a child being harmed but not the risk of being well cared for. Yet the positive possibilities are an essential part of decision making, of deciding what actions are most likely, on balance, to be in the child’s best interests. Most instruments available also only deal with the major decision points in child protection, such as whether to investigate a referral or remove a child, but practitioners have to make numerous smaller risk assessments and decisions in daily practice so understanding the process will help them. Another value of having such understanding is that practitioners are then more informed, critical users of assessment instruments and then will be able to give a better account to families of how they have reached their conclusions. A final reason for understanding the underlying processes is that jurisdictions have significant differences in their fundamental approach to working with families. Some see assessment and decision making as tasks for the practitioner, and for them the formal tools are unproblematic. Others aim to work with families and to share the reasoning processes with them, at least to some degree, and having a basic framework for doing this can help them to manage the complex tangle of information and views.

Chapter 7 discusses the challenges of managing the uncertainty that pervades the work. Uncertainty is now framed as ‘risk’ and professionals are tasked with risk assessment and management. This chapter explains the ways our intuitive understanding tends to err in dealing with probabilities and how formal methods can help in using risk factor research and understanding risk calculations. There is a growing interest (and practice) in using predictive analytics to inform decision making so new material discusses the technical, ethical and legal criteria for judging such tools.

The following chapter, 8, deals with the practical processes of risk assessment, setting out a framework and then going through it in detail, exploring the difficulties that arise at each stage and discussing what types of reasoning skills are needed to resolve them.

Chapter 9 addresses the question of how to manage the identified risk. It sets out the two main approaches in decision-making research: the descriptive approach that has studied how people actually make decisions, and the prescriptive approach that draws on probability and decision theories to construct a model of rational decision making.

The prescribed image of a decision maker, looking at a range of options and weighing up their relative merits, is like Figure 1.1. However, people making decisions in everyday life function in ways closer to Figure 1.2, navigating their way through a rough sea, making a sequence of small decisions ‘to maintain a meandering course toward the ultimate goal’ (Hogarth, 1981). The latter image perhaps more accurately conveys the process of conducting an investigation (with a procedure manual as a map) while the former seems a good model for making the major decisions about children’s welfare, such as where they should live.

Figure 1.1 The prescriptive model of decision making

Figure 1.2 The descriptive model of decision making

The former body of literature offers useful insights for decision making under pressure of time – which is a large part of any ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Table List
• About the Author
• Preface to the 3rd Edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Child protection agencies as complex adaptive systems
• 3 Expertise in child protection work
• 4 Evaluating complex social interventions
• 5 The social context
• 6 Defining child abuse
• 7 The challenges of managing uncertainty in practice
• 8 The process of assessing risk
• 9 Making decisions
• 10 How organisations can support effective practice
• 11 Conclusion
• References
• Index