Proactive Child Protection and Social Work

Liz Davies, Nora Duckett, Author

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780857259714, 9781446257128
• eBook ISBN: 9780857259721
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Protecting children from abuse and neglect is a serious and complex area of social work practice and understanding the critical skills of communicating with and listening to children?s voices, and those of their advocates and survivors, is essential. In this new edition of a highly-regarded book, the authors offer a strengthened children?s rights perspective and explore four main categories of child abuse - emotional abuse, sexual abuse, neglect and physical abuse. The book also considers legal safeguards and protective processes to increase the creativity and confidence of those undertaking such work. 

 

Locating knowledge and skills within a series of case examples from real life practice and serious case reviews, this book is an indispensable resource for students, professionals and others concerned with protecting children. This second edition has been comprehensively revised and updated to include current research evidence and a focus on the neglected protection needs of sexually exploited young people, children in custody, disabled children, young carers and unaccompanied child migrants.

Chapter 1 Legal safeguards and protective processes

Achieving a Social Work Degree

This chapter will help you to develop the following capabilities, to the appropriate level, from the PCF.

• Professionalism
  Represent and be accountable to the profession.
• Values and ethics
  Apply social work ethical principles and values to guide professional practice.
• Diversity
  Recognise diversity and apply anti-oppressive principles in practice.
• Knowledge
  Apply knowledge of social sciences, law and social work practice theory.
• Critical reflection and analysis
  Apply critical reflection and analysis to inform and provide a rationale for professional decision making.
• Intervention and skills
  Use judgement and authority to intervene with individuals, families and communities to promote independence, provide support and prevent harm, neglect and abuse.
• Contexts and organisations
  Engage with, inform and adapt to changing practice contexts and operate effectively within own organisational frameworks and within multi-agency and inter-professional settings.
• Professional leadership
  Take responsibility for the professional learning and development of others through supervision, mentoring, assessing, research, teaching, leadership and management.

It will also introduce you to the following academic standards as set out in the social work subject benchmark statements:

• 5.1.2 The service delivery context
• 5.1.4 Social work theory
• 5.5 Problem-solving skills
• 5.6 Communication skills
• 5.7 Skills in working with others
• 7.3 Knowledge and understanding

(www.qaa.ac.uk/en/Publications/Documents/Subject-benchmark-statement-Social-work.pdf)

Work with the family was not sufficiently formalized. Strategy meetings did not properly record individual agency and professional responsibilities and there was a lack of analysis based on accurate chronologies and sharing of information. There was no child protection conference and therefore no forum for multi-agency collation of information and analysis and no child protection plan.

(CSCB, 2013: 6.19)

Responding to an allegation

For 59 per cent of respondents the abuse continued following disclosure. In only 11 per cent of cases did abuse stop at the same time as telling someone.

(OCC, 2015, p65)

On hearing a child's initial disclosure a social worker must find out just enough to inform a referral to the appropriate duty team. This involves asking a few open questions such as: Tell me more, explain/ describe that further to me and how did it happen as I wasn't there? Such questions do not put words in the child's mouth and will not interfere with any subsequent investigation. The social worker should reassure the child that they are taking what they say seriously rather than say they believe the child at this stage, as whether the statement has validity is a matter for later investigation and possibly a court. They should reassure the child that they are brave to speak and that they are not in any way at fault. Some children may only be able to describe child abuse using crude language. It is important not to prevent the use of such words but to explore what is meant by them with as little interruption to the flow of the account as possible. The child should be informed that in order to keep children safe other social workers and police must be informed and that the disclosure cannot be kept a secret. No false promises and no assumptions should be made about what may have happened. If the child continues to provide a lengthy account, the social worker should listen and not interrupt. A child may say that they do not feel normal or they feel dirty and it is important to acknowledge the feelings and then explore further what they mean. Saying of course you aren't dirty would be to dismiss their feelings. Gaining the child's trust and supporting them sufficiently to help them have the courage to tell a police officer what happened is a very important social work skill.

Recording must be contemporaneous in order to be credible in any civil or criminal proceedings. This means making a record as soon as possible after the interview, even if that means a hand-written report and possibly writing a few phrases down during the interview while checking with the child that you have recorded their words exactly as they meant them. An account of the child's emotional response should be recorded, as well as any repetition and the context of the disclosure being made as these factors may validate the account.

Social workers must act as a bridge between a child and the investigating social workers and police to enable a formal, visually recorded statement to be made. Social workers may avoid direct communication with a child about abuse out of fear, inexperience and concern about not wanting to contaminate evidence. In fact it is essential that social workers do enable children to tell and clearly understand how to do this.

Statutory Protocols

Practitioners need to have a clear overview of the law relating to children, particularly the Children Acts 1989 and 2004. It is important to recognise the distinction between criminal law, which targets the perpetrators of crime and where evidence is tested beyond all reasonable doubt, and civil law, where children may gain protection on the lower balance of probabilities level of proof. In child protection it is difficult to achieve the prosecution of abusers; however, if there is no criminal prosecution, social workers must still protect the child using civil proceedings and support any application for criminal injuries compensation.

Working Together to Safeguard Children (DfE, 2015) states that all professionals must be alert to the risk of harm that abusers may present to children and implement the actions needed to keep the child safe. Sections 10 and 11 (CA 2004) place duties on a range of organisations and individuals to ensure that their services, including those outsourced, lead to effective child protection arrangements. Each local authority must have an LSCB. The membership is outlined in the Children Act 2004 (s13) and includes senior members of all relevant agencies. Working Together to Safeguard Children (DfE, 2015) states there must be an independent chairperson and outlines that the LSCBs have responsibility to co-ordinate the work of all the individuals and agencies involved. LSCBs are responsible for policy and practice development in relation to thresholds for intervention, training, recruitment and supervision, investigation of allegations, the resolution of inter-agency conflict and co-operation with neighbouring authorities. Another key responsibility is to conduct serious case reviews when a child has died or been seriously harmed by abuse and where there are concerns about how professionals worked together on the case. These must be published to support learning (DfE, 2015). Each agency has specialist designated child protection leads who act as consultants. Systems relevant to a focus on perpetrators include the MAPPA and Multi Agency Risk Assessment Conference (MARAC) (DCSF, 2010a).

Section 47 (CA 1989) refers to the local authority's duty to investigate when they have reasonable cause to suspect that a child who lives, or is found, in their area is suffering or is likely to suffer significant harm, that authority shall make or cause to be made, such enquiries as they consider necessary to enable them to decide whether they should take any action to safeguard or promote the child's welfare. The Children Act (1989) defines harm as ill-treatment or the impairment of health or development. The Adoption and Children Act (2002) extended this definition to include impairment suffered from seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another. Development means physical, intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development; and health means physical or mental health. Ill-treatment includes sexual abuse and forms of ill treatment which are non-physical. It is a matter for professional judgement as to whether these criteria apply in a particular case, including making comparison with what could reasonably be expected of a similar child. Practitioners strive to reach agreement about the threshold for protective intervention through debate and analysis at multi-agency statutory forums, such as strategy meetings and child protection conferences.

Assessment protocols require consent to be gained from parents and carers for checks to be made but in a section 47 (CA 1989) investigation, the protection of the child is the paramount consideration and consent must be gained only where this is in the best interests of the child and when it does not interfere with any criminal investigation. For instance, conducting an assessment might interfere with police interviews of the parents/carers as suspects or witnesses and the interview of the child might be inappropriate if a visually recorded interview is needed. Decisions about consent to information sharing must be made at a strategy discussion/meeting. Seven golden rules for sharing information are outlined in government guidance (HM Government, 2015a) which specifically emphasises the principles of necessary, proportionate, relevant, adequate, accurate, timely and secure. Social workers need to be absolutely clear that strategy meetings and child protection conferences have a foundation in law with accountability for all professionals involved and must never be replaced by processes such as network or professionals meetings.

The Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub

Year after year there had been far too many communication breakdowns meaning crucial information was not passed on or acted on when received. Amazingly this problem had been addressed way back when in 1990 in an enlightened experiment, a north London police child protection unit and a team of social workers were housed together in Havering. This made perfect sense to me. We would love to have organised face to face formal and informal meetings, information exchanges and to travel together on visits but for whatever reason it was judged by the powers that be as a failure and was forever forgotten.

(Keeble and Hollington, 2010)

We strongly encourage all local authorities to consider the merits of moving to multi-agency co-location models … this should include co-location of local police child abuse teams with children's social care.

(Home Office, 2013; Stanley, et al., 2010; HC 137:1, 2013, p68)

Many local authorities now co-ordinate a multi-agency safeguarding hub (MASH) team at the point of referral. The MASH principles are of information sharing across agencies, joint decision making and co-ordinated intervention. Numbers of key agencies are situated together with access to their specific databases, enabling fast checks to be made as to action required following a referral and enabling urgent protective action. Co-operation promotes multi-agency working but team structures must be in place to take those actions forward to continue any subsequent investigation. Parents/carers and children need to consent for family information to be shared within the MASH. Without consent, the MASH manager decides whether or not the threshold of child protection has been reached sufficiently to justify over-riding the parent's/carer's view. All such decisions must be proportionate and balance the risk to the child with family rights to privacy.

Research of MASH functioning (Home Office, 2013) in five local authorities provided positive feedback stating that MASH led to more robust decision making based on sufficient, accurate and timely intelligence resulting in better assessment of when to step up or step down investigations. The approach avoided duplication of process across agencies, reduced the risk of cases slipping through the protection net and there was strong accountability through the LSCB. Also, co-location of agencies led to shar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction and Key Themes
• Chapter 1 Legal safeguards and protective processes
• Chapter 2 Emotional Abuse
• Chapter 3 Sexual Abuse
• Chapter 4 Neglect
• Chapter 5 Physical Abuse
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Professional Capabilities Framework
• Appendix 2 Subject Benchmark for Social Work
• References
• Index