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CHAPTER 1
Concepts, Public Policy and Research
Christine M. Oliver and Jane Dalrymple
Over the past decade or so, advocacy for children and young people has moved from the margins to the centre of public policy. Yet, advocacy is not widely understood as a concept or as a practice. Further, there is little research evidence placed in the public domain that can assist those curious about advocacy to find answers to any questions they may have. By drawing together the work of a number of researchers active in this field, we aim to begin the process of exploring advocacy from a range of perspectives â what it means, how it is practised, and what kind of impact it has on the lives of children and young people. We hope that policy makers, professionals working in childrenâs health and social care, and all who work directly with children will become more aware of the advocacy role and its potential for promoting childrenâs participation in decision-making and the development of genuinely child-centred services.
We use the phrase âdeveloping advocacyâ to highlight our understanding of advocacy as an evolving and dynamic way of working with children and young people. We also explore the relationship between the theory and practice of advocacy, highlighting the ways in which understandings of the concept of advocacy influence practice, and vice versa. We take this approach for a number of reasons. First, advocacy for children and young people might be described as in the early stages of professional development. Consequently, many advocates acquire their skills âon the jobâ. Yet, advocacy can be a highly demanding role and a set of guiding principles can help advocates to navigate the complexities and dilemmas of advocacy practice. Thus, we hope the book will help advocates to reflect on their practice, without necessarily offering a simplistic prescription or recipe for âwhat worksâ in childrenâs advocacy. Second, until recently, emphasis has been given to debates about the principles of advocacy. While this is of crucial importance, we also aim to provide descriptions of advocacy practice in order to provide some insight into how principles translate into practice and to provide the reader with a more immediate sense of what advocacy with children and young people entails.
We explore the increasing prominence given to advocacy for children and young people in public policy. The Adoption and Children Act 2002 gave advocacy statutory status for the first time and the Governmentâs most recent proposals for improving the life chances of children in public care (DfES 2006) places advocacy centre stage. But, as we will see later, policy developments have yet to catch up with advocacy as it is understood and practised by most advocacy services and childrenâs agencies in the voluntary sector. History shows that many radical ideas and forms of service provision have originated in the voluntary or charitable sector, only to be adopted, and often assimilated, into mainstream services. It is as yet unclear which direction Government policy in relation to advocacy for children and young people will take. It would therefore seem to be an opportune time to review how and why advocacy services for children and young people have developed in recent decades, and to identify some possible signposts for the future.
Advocacy for children and young people as a developing concept
Described as one of the oldest forms of support (Brandon 1995), the formal and best known development of advocacy is in relation to legal services where the role of an advocate in court (as a solicitor or barrister) is to represent the interests of their clients, speak up on their behalf and protect their rights (Wertheimer, 1996). As Chapter 10 shows, this definition of advocacy raises some interesting questions about the similarities and differences in roles and responsibilities between legal and non-legal advocates. Outside of strictly legal contexts, dictionary definitions portray advocates as people who act positively on behalf of someone else (Bateman 1995). Over time, advocacy for children and young people has evolved within a similar conceptual framework, but tends to place more emphasis on the notion of âvoiceâ: advocacy is most commonly defined as a process of enabling children and young people to âhave a voiceâ about matters of concern to them (Dalrymple and Hough 1995).
Advocacy for children and young people draws on a number of historical roots. Some of its inspiration derives from the ideas and expertise developed by service user groups and movements in the late 1980s, particularly those pioneered by people with disabilities and by survivors of the mental health system. Service user groups identified links between forms of service provision that were experienced as inadequate and stigmatising and wider patterns of social inequality and discrimination. This led to what Beresford describes as the âemergence of new participants in social policy: service users and their movementsâ (2002, p.496). In this context, advocacy developed as a key tool in adjusting the power relations between service users and service providers (Braye and Preston-Shoot 1995; Tunnard 1997), and as a vital element in challenging inequality and oppression:
When people are denied or unable to gain access to a fair share of whatâs on offer in society â when they are denied information or opportunities to take part in decisions concerning their lives â when they are dispossessed of insight, dignity, self confidence â then it becomes necessary in a caring society for more powerful people to act with integrity on their behalf or wherever possible to enable them to move to a point where they can retrieve control for themselves. (Advocacy in Action 1990)
This analysis suggests that those who suffer the effects of social inequality may need someone to speak (act) on their behalf or support to enable them to move towards a position of being able to advocate for themselves (self-advocacy).
However, the service user movement has been largely adult-dominated. While childrenâs advocacy shares a common ethos with many adult forms of advocacy, there are also important differences. Advocacy for children and young people has developed with a specific focus on children in public care, and children considered âin needâ. As a result, advocacy engages with discourses concerning the relationship between the social construction of childhood and the concept of care â for example, whether children are perceived as active agents or passive recipients of care or even as care givers. Historically, adults in their capacity as parents or welfare professionals, have claimed to know âwhatâs bestâ for children in relation to their care, particularly for young children. However, notions of what constitutes adequate or optimum care have changed over time, and the idea that children should have a voice, and be listened to, has only recently gained acceptance. Even so, it has been argued that the current zeitgeist in favour of âlisteningâ to children and young people may be more a question of rhetoric than of reality (McNeish 1999). In this context, advocacy offers a potentially important mechanism for translating childrenâs rights to participation in decision-making into practice.
Advocacy for children and young people is also distinct from advocacy for adults in that it operates in the context of social norms concerning childrenâs capacities to engage in decision-making. Children are widely perceived, biologically and cognitively, as immature but developing towards adulthood. As a result, there are debates about the age or stage at which children can, or should, be involved in decisions about their care. Further, some children, regardless of age, are more likely than others to be excluded from decision-making, such as children with disabilities. Chapter 7 provides examples of advocacy with children with disabilities, including children without speech. They illustrate the ways in which advocates have developed a variety of methods for working with children of varying capacities, underpinned in some cases by a clearly articulated rights-based model of advocacy.
Further, peer advocacy (that is, advocacy offered by someone who shares a common identity or experience) is a less common feature of childrenâs advocacy compared with adult forms of advocacy. Given the double jeopardy experienced by children in public care â that they are both children and stigmatised for being in care â adult advocates are often needed to challenge adult-constructed decision-making systems. However, the involvement of adults as advocates for children raises important questions about the power dynamics of the advocacy relationship. Sensitivity to, and awareness of, the ways in which adult advocates can either empower children, or collude with professional or parental decision-making, is a key issue in advocacy practice. For this reason, authors describe and discuss advocacy practice in detail, highlighting the ways in which advocates attempt to work with children to construct a flexible and empathic relationship that takes account of their specific capacities, wishes and circumstances. Chapter 6, for example, uses in-depth case studies to identify the range of issues faced by young people in and leaving care and the complex dynamics that come into play between the young person, the advocate and other adults, including health and social care professionals.
If advocacy is about âhaving a voiceâ or âspeaking upâ, then this suggests that children and young people who need advocacy are routinely silenced and marginalised by other, more powerful, individuals and decision-making systems. Thus, advocacy might be best understood as an empowerment practice. In the context of childrenâs health and social care, a large and ever increasing number of adult professionals may be involved in decisions about an individual childâs well-being. Increasingly, professional decision-making operates within the boundaries of formal assessment procedures and fora. Participating in such decision-making structures can be a confusing and intimidating experience for a child. Several chapters in this book investigate the role of advocacy in such contexts, including child protection conferences (Chapter 4), family group conferences (Chapter 5), reviews (Chapter 3) and in relation to formal complaints procedures (Chapters 8 and 9). However, as a result of such involvement, there is some debate about the extent to which advocacy is becoming increasingly proceduralised and thereby functioning as an adaptive, rather than radical, force of change for children. In Chapter 3, Jane Boylan highlights the potential limitations of advocacy and suggests that a critical perspective on existing advocacy provision for looked after children and young people is needed.
Discourses of childrenâs rights, childhood and youth have been influential in contributing to understandings of childrenâs agency and voice. In order to understand both the need for, and attitudes to, advocacy for children and young people, it is therefore necessary to consider contemporary debates about constructions of childhood alongside emerging perspectives on childrenâs rights and participation in public policy.
Childrenâs advocacy and public policy
A number of trends in national and international law, and changes in social policy, reflect and reinforce a renewed focus on the status and rights of children and young people. The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child represented a historic landmark, signalling an important shift in attitudes to children and their place in society. While globally, there are wide variations in childrenâs status in law, in the family, and in their access to economic and social resources, the Convention established a set of universal rights for children and young people against which social progress on a local level might be measured. In particular, Article 12 upheld childrenâs rights to participation in decision-making about matters of concern to them and provided an impetus and a justification for the growth of advocacy for children and young people.
The UN Convention of the Rights of the Child also influenced the spirit and substance of the 1989 Children Act. Heralded as âthe most far-reaching reform of child care law which has come before Parliament in living memoryâ, (Mackay 1998), the 1989 Children Act established childrenâs welfare as the central principle in decision-making, but it also set out the rights of children to be consulted on their needs and wishes. For some, the 1989 Children Act was seen as a vehicle for empowering children and young people to participate in decisions about their care (Smith and Woodhead 1999). Others were more cautious, citing the lack of wholehearted support given to advocacy in the accompanying Guidance and Regulations (Timms 1995). Over time, the shortcomings of the 1989 Children Act in facilitating childrenâs participatory rights have become more apparent, particularly in relation to childrenâs access to, and use of, complaints procedures.
In theory, complaints procedures should enable children to voice their concerns to their âcorporate parentâ. In practice, they have been widely criticised for being adult-oriented, inaccessible, lacking in confidentiality and difficult to negotiate without the support of an advocate (Aiers and Kettle, 1998; Utting, 1997). As a result, the Adoption and Children Act 2002 established a statutory duty on local authorities to provide advocacy for children wishing to make a complaint under the 1989 Children Act regulations. The relationship between advocacy and complaints procedures is explored in Chapters 8 and 9, which discuss findings from a Welsh Assembly Government-funded study of complaints against social services involving children and their use of advocacy services. Chapter 8 explores professional (social workers and their managers) attitudes towards advocacy providers and the likely impact of this upon day to day practice. Drawing on the same study, Chapter 9 focuses on the views of young people and argues that the findings challenge the assumption that the availability of complaints procedures and advocacy support services in themselves can provide an effective means of protecting the most vulnerable children from the worst abuses of our healthcare, social care, education or legal systems.
Advocacy for children and young people has evolved within both protectionist and rights-oriented discourses. These developments form part of a wider shift towards perceiving children and young people as active agents in their lives rather than merely passive recipients of service provision. At the same time, childrenâs need for protection from abuse and neglect remains a powerful force. A series of investigations into child abuse in residential care, for example, highlighted that, without independent representation, children were not heard or believed, suffered isolation and lacked a means of redress (Utting 1997). Such findings provided an important impetus to the growth, and just...
