Interacting With the Child Protection Service

This chapter focuses on the women’s interaction with child protection workers and he child protection system in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV). Many women who have experienced IPV have contact with child protection services (CPS); some contact CPS seeking help, and others are investigated by CPS as a result of IPV and complaints made about their mothering. Three key themes are explored in this chapter. Women felt they were held to account by CPS workers for their ex-partner’s IPV. A number of women reported that their partners made malicious allegations to CPS about them, leading to lengthy and stressful investigations that resulted in no concerns being found about their mothering. Some women’s experiences highlighted the complex experience of IPV, intergenerational trauma, and CPS involvement.

The shame and shaming of parents in the child protection process: findings from a case study of an English child protection service

Given that research identifies parental experiences of shame and humiliation in the child protection process, this article reports on a qualitative study that investigated how and why parents experienced such emotions within the English system. This is the first study to investigate such experiences by using participant observation, which enabled the collection of data of real-time emotional experiences and practices. These experiences are analysed within the context of wider reforms of the English child protection system, and identify not only the structural and systemic reasons that embed parental experiences of shame into the process, but also the societal processes that support practitioners to shame, and even humiliate, parents. These processes are detailed and the shaming of parents illustrated. Rather than such experiences being seen as outcomes of poor practice, social workers can be considered to be doing a good job at the same time as shaming a parent.

Compassion Fatigue and Resilience among Child Protection Service Workers in South Africa

The aim of this quantitative, inferential research was to investigate how working with vulnerable and abused children and families has an impact on child protection service workers in South Africa. In particular, the study explores whether such work leads to compassion fatigue, and whether there is a relationship between compassion fatigue and resilience. Compassion fatigue is recognised as a state of exhaustion that results in helping professionals losing their ability to empathise with their clients, while resilience refers to the process of adaptation in the face of adversity. Using availability sampling, online questionnaires were sent to child protection service workers at the “Afrikaanse Christelike Vrouevereniging”, a national child protection non-profit organisation. The questionnaire included the Professional Quality of Life Scale that measures compassion fatigue, and the Brief Resilience Scale that measures one’s ability to bounce back from stress or adversity. The responses of 81 child protection service workers who completed the questionnaire were captured and analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. The results of this research showed that the participants are impacted by their work in the field of child protection and are vulnerable to compassion fatigue. Furthermore, the results showed a relationship between the Brief Resilience Scale and the Professional Quality of Life Scale, i.e. when the participants’ resilience scores were higher, compassion fatigue scores tended to be lower.

Å balansere mellom barnevernets prinsipper

The focus of this chapter is the potential conflicts between the values that are basic in the work of Norwegian child protection service. Such values are expressed in principles that serve as guidelines for judgement and decisions in the field. ‘The best interest of the child’ principle is held to be grounding. The ‘mildest intervention’ principle and the ‘biological’ principle are normally held to be at the core of how the best interest of the child is to be understood. Important in child protection work, is to interpret the principles, weigh them, and consider what implications they should have in specific cases. I argue that if, for some reason, one principle is ascribed too much weigh on the cost of others, the solution for the child might not be in its best interest. I highlight the importance of not only weighing the principles against each other, but also creating a coherent balance between the principles, people’s moral intuitions and the actual practices of the service. To this end, I suggest that John Rawls’s model called reflective equilibrium might be workable.