The capability approach: what can it offer child protection policy and practice in England?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brid Featherstone ◽  
Anna Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Capability Approach ◽  
Family Welfare ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Protection Policy ◽  
Neoliberal Ideology ◽  
Child Protection Policy ◽  
The Capability Approach

This chapter examines what the capability approach can contribute to child protection policy and practice in England as an alternative conceptual framework for social work that challenges the dominance of neoliberal ideology in ways consistent with the promotion of human rights and social justice. After providing an overview of the historical and political contexts of child protection policy in England, the chapter considers the ways poverty and parenting are constructed in the dominant discourses as well as the policies and practices that have developed within this context. It also analyses the impact of interventions on parents and argues that contemporary child protection policy and practice in England is based on a narrow approach to child and family welfare and the role of social work. It concludes with recommendations for policy and practice that aims to promote greater social justice.

The Poverty-Aware Paradigm for Child Protection: A Critical Framework for Policy and Practice

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 1167-1184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuval Saar-Heiman ◽  
Anna Gupta
Keyword(s):  
British Journal ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Previous Issue ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Protection Policy ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Protection Systems ◽  
Child Protection Policy

Abstract This article aims to present a Poverty-Aware Paradigm for Child Protection (PAPCP). The increasing scholarly recognition of the damaging impact of poverty, inequality and the neoliberal politics of ‘risk’ on child protection policy and practice, has highlighted the need for a justice-based and poverty-aware analytical framework for child protection social work. In order to create such a framework, we build upon Krumer-Nevo’s Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP)—that was first presented in a previous issue of the British Journal of Social Work—and adapt its paradigmatic premises to the context of child protection social work. By addressing ontological, epistemological and axiological questions underpinning the construction of risk and the practices utilised to deal with it, the article provides a clear, practical and applicable link between critical theories and everyday child protection practice. The PAPCP is presented against the background of the risk-focused paradigm currently dominating the child protection systems in both the authors’ countries—Israel and England.

Preventing and responding to errors in US child protection

2020 ◽  
pp. 235-254
Author(s):  
Jill Duerr Berrick ◽  
Jaclyn Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Child Welfare ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Predictive Analytics ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Protection Policy ◽  
Risk Assessment Tools ◽  
The Us ◽  
Child Protection Policy

This chapter demonstrates how concerns about avoiding errors and mistakes have been at the centre of child protection policy and practice in the US for many years. In particular the chapter focuses on providing a summary of the state of the art relating to risk assessment tools and predictive analytics as strategies to reduce error in child welfare decision making. It also examines whether our understanding of ‘error’ needs to shift to account for the unknowns. When social workers make decisions based upon fundamental principles, and when they determine that it is in the interests of a child to privilege one principle over another, the result may appear in hindsight as an “error”, but when made as a decision guided by one widely-held principle which was in direct conflict with another. Examining child welfare decision making as a process of selecting and then privileging one principle over another narrows what we might otherwise think of as an ‘error’ and instead recasts some decisions as exceedingly difficult to get ‘right’.

scholarly journals The contemporary refocusing of children’s services in England

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 85-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Parton ◽  
Sasha Williams
Keyword(s):  
Social Workers ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Coalition Government ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Protection Policy ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
Social Reaction ◽  
Child Protection Policy

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the changes in child protection policy and practice in England over the last 30 years, in particular to critically analyse the nature and impact of the “refocusing” initiative of the mid-1990s. Design/methodology/approach Policy analysis. Findings While the period from the mid-1990s until 2008 can be seen to show how policy and practice attempted to build on a number of the central principles of the “refocusing” initiative, the period since 2008 has been very different. Following the huge social reaction to the death of Peter Connelly, policy and practice moved in directions quite contra to the “refocusing” initiative’s aims and aspirations such that we can identify a refocusing of “refocusing”. Such developments were given a major impetus with the election of the Coalition government in 2010 and have been reinforced further following the election of the Conservative government in May 2015. Originality/value The paper places the changes in child protection policy and practice in England in their political and economic contexts and makes explicit how the changes impact on the role and responsibilities of professionals, particularly social workers.

scholarly journals Outing the Elephants: Exploring a New Paradigm for Child Protection Social Work

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Hyslop ◽  
Emily Keddell
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Material Deprivation ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Structural Inequality ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Child Protection Policy

This article sets out to deconstruct and challenge the psychologised and pathologising approach that has come to dominate child protection practice in Aotearoa-New Zealand and comparable societies in neoliberal times. Within a risk and protection focused paradigm circumstances and behaviours associated with material deprivation are construed as indicators of heightened danger and harm as opposed to a means of better understanding family life. In this way, although poverty may be classified as an issue that is worthy of attention in the realm of broader economic and social policy, structural inequality is rendered largely irrelevant to the practice of statutory child protection. This article sets out to trouble this construction. It will be argued that understandings of how the effects of material inequality are played out in the lives of children and their families are critical to the development of more effective child protection social work. This ‘life-world’ is generally populated by young women parenting in poverty. Poverty exacerbates the everyday struggle of parenting - it shames and dis-empowers; reducing confidence and perceptions of competence (Gupta, 2015). A paradigm shift is needed. Child protection policy and practice needs to re-engage with the every-day struggles that accompany the lives of socially marginalised families in increasingly stratified late capitalist society. The future of social work in child protection depends on it.

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