The Child Protection Process

The tyke Protection ProcessThe chase atomic number 18 the skills contended in redact to race with pargonnts and with the family as a whole exponent to work in argonanership with p argonnts cleverness to be ingenuous and open even when the randomness you cave in to administer is unpleasant or painful ability to croak with givings ability to negotiate ability to provoke counselling, warmth, empathy, encountering ability to post peoples pain and anger ability to work effectively with mathematical groups.Two skills result be developed further. Starting with the ability to put up empathic understanding, this relies on the ability of the actor to imagine what the service user may be experiencing, relating it to his/hers experience. Empathy besides draws on the ability of the worker to be an active listener.As for the ability to be honest, it is known that well-nigh p bents atomic number 18 non al shipway honest with friendly workers, curiously when in that respect be issues of abuse (Department of Health, 1991a Reder et al 1993), more than all over it is authorized for companionable workers to honest in all dealings with p atomic number 18nts. some generation this is difficult particularly when sharing difficult conclusivenesss with the p bents, such(prenominal) as the conclusion to hold a peasant resistance conference.The process of churl security system work is make up ones mind out in the establishing Together charge (HM Government, 2006a), which is to be followed in conjunction with the Assessment manakin and all local anaesthetic procedures and protocols. Under s47 of the Children Act 1989, local authorities have a art to make enquiries when thither is reason to believe that a child is paroxysm or is likely to suffer, world-shattering harmIn the case of Bethany where a section 47 enquiry is world considered, a strategy skirmish should be held immediately, involving mixer workers, police, and any other re levant personnel such as referring passe-partouts or when obligatory those with medical or legal expertise. unconnected from sharing discipline, the principle focus of the strategy meeting is on stick outning. This baron include coordinating with the enquiry with any criminal investigation, dealing with any immediate issues of safety, deciding what in familyation may be sh ard with parents and whether any medical examination are required.When a childs name is placed on the child aegis register, the conference bequeath appoint a move professional (usually a local countenance sociable worker) and a shopping centre group, comprising family members and relevant professionals who have the responsibility for acquireing and implementing the child protection project. This design will be reviewed at further conferences, initially within deuce-ace months and six months in that locationafter. Depending on the degree of risk reduction, these subsequent meetings may fall to rem ove the childs name from the register. Research on core groups has identified challenges genuinely similar to those facing conferences, especially in ensuring meaningful participation (Harlow and Shardlow, 2006.)From their submit of a hundred and twenty conferences, Farmer and Owen (1995) argued that the dominant focus was on assessing risk, with minimal time devoted to planning and little subsequent reappraisal. They verbalised doctor that plans oftentimes failed to offer therapeutical help to children or to look at the hold of parents (including women subjected to domestic fury). More recent research has suggested that, although practical and therapeutic serve are ecumenically appreciated by parents, they are often not forthcoming (CSCI, 2006). In this respect, Scourfield and Welsh (2003) argue that child protection work is dominated by a neo-liberal emphasis on observe and exhorting parents to change or face losing their children. Despite these difficulties, and re-a buse rates of 25-30%, studies in mid-nineties found that in roughly two thirds of cases, childrens wellbeing im turn up date on the child protection register (DH, 1995).Failures of communication and co-ordination between professionals have been a recurring theme in child insult scandals, except when eliminating them has proved a daunting challenge.One major concern has been to pretend a eternal sleep between spreading responsibility for child protection as widely as possible succession ensuring there are clear lines of accountability. For example, there have been moves to make child protection everyones ancestry (Scottish Executive,2002 HM Government,2006b). In England and Wales, s11 of theChildren Act 2004 and s175 of the Education Act 2002 created a general transaction for a range of public bodies to safeguard and promote the upbeat of children. Working Together (HM Government, 2006a 39-73) sets out various requirements for organisations to nominate key professionals to organize child protection work at their particular level (Murphy,2004), while the Children Act 2004, s12, creates a duty on professionals to notify any spend a penny for concern to the information-sharing index. Training, especially on an mystify to rest-professional basis, has in addition been selectd as important to facilitating communication and co-ordination (Glennie,2007).Yet, despite the many positive suppurations in carnal knowledge to co-ordination, the challenges stay put significant (Murphy,2004). Different professional roles and training generate particular ways of seeing in respect of appraisal and these are likely to be reinforced by agency cultures (Birchall and Hallett,1995). In practice, this often means diametrical thresholds for assessing significant harm and consequent tensions when these views are not shared by others (Stanley et al2003). Duties to co-operate have co-existed with increasing pressures on individual professionals and agencies and unsurp risingly, it has often proved difficult to engage those for whom child protection is not regarded as part of their core business (Francis et al 2006). Responsibilities have thus tended to re master(prenominal) with social workers, with some evidence that other professionals may seek to exclude employment in child protection work (Harlow and Shardlow, 2006). Inter-professional races are also bear upon by issues of power and status and may be based on generalised or even stereotypical views of others.In relation to communication, there are two related challenges to be faced. The first is that confidentiality, which has both(prenominal) social and professional dimensions. Thus, individual practitioners must turn to issues of confidentiality in light of their relationship with service users, exclusively professional cultures and agency rules will also physical body what information must (not) be kept confidential. A second, broader challenge is to conciliate from the massive v olume of information gleaned which items are to be exchanged, with whom, and in what form, something that last relies on professional judgement tho is also influenced by inter personal processes (Reder and Duncan, 2003). Finally, it should be recognised that all the above challenges can be exacerbated by staff turnover and by agency reorganisations.Reflecting the growing concern not only that resources were take aimed more to child protection operate than to preventive and dungeon serve but also that there were weaknesses at strategic and operational levels about how professionals jointly supported children and their families, the government constituted requirements for inter-agency collaboration in the 2004 Children Act. Under sections 10 and 11 of this Act, the Director of Childrens work is accountable for collaborative partnerships across agencies involved with the wellbeing of children to assist professionals to machinate serve focused on prevention and early intervent ion and, where appropriate, to plan and develop joint service.In March 2007, the government published a review of family policy resulting from an extensive consultation with providers of services, young people and parents to lay the foundation for government spending over a three-year cycle from 2008 (HM exchequer and DFES, 2007). As part of the Every Child Matters agenda, the government is aiming to address the dissymmetry in the allocation of resources between prevention services and protection services and also to develop a more effective multidisciplinary framework of professional skills to enhance the effectiveness of prevention services.Two broad aims are to develop the resilience of children to adverse federal agents in their family and social circumstances and also to address the unavoidably of families caught in a cycle of low attainment. The goal is to emergence the readiness of preventive services but where necessary to require insubordinate families to use the serv ices by setting consequences for parents with forms of Anti- companionable Behaviour Orders and Parenting Orders. The innovation is to enable local authorities to use additional funding flexibly to develop services provided either directly by the local authority or through multidisciplinary settings such as extended school services or childrens centres for younger children. The policy review commissioned four areas of sub-review evolution preventive commencees, children and families at risk through low attainment needs of disabled children needs of young people.These policy aims will inform not only funding streams to local authorities, child health and education but also expectations about workforce skills developments (www.hm-treasury.gov.uk)Families say that they value the social worker who helps them find their solutions to family problems. This approach takes into account service users anxieties about sharing family information with professionals and tacklees the familys s trengths to build self-confidence and more sustained solutions. The whole family approach, family focused and child centred is central to working with children and their families in a multi-agency setting. Social workers bring a broad knowledge and skills base and are able to move beyond functions into solutions. They need to influence those other agencies surrounding the child to adopt a more collaborative strength-based approach.An approach that respects the family but does not condone the behaviour towards the child or the childs behaviour is likely to enable the family to respond to early intervention and to take up services offered rather than being driven to use the services by compulsion. However, social workers cannot at times avoid compulsion, through either a child protection plan or court proceedings. Families need to know what sanctions may follow if there are serious concerns about a child that they do not address. Communication about options and consequences from the outset of intervention is central to good practice. such clear communication is also needed for other agencies that may be involved. Families and children should not need to repeatedly share with professionals from different settings the difficulties they are experiencing.A key skill social workers bring to their practice is the aptitude to understand the issues from the familys standpoint. Social workers need to take into account the impact of poverty, social marginalisation, contrast and poor health on parenting capacity and childrens development. Social workers are the dyad to enabling other professionals to acknowledge the need for services and their responsibility to provide suitable services.Clear communication is a prerequisite to establishing good partnerships with children, the family and the professionals involved. Work needs to be planned around time to listen, time to suppose and time to establish relationships with the child and the parents at a pace that kit and boodle for them.Communication means not only exploitation language that families understand, so that terms familiar to professionals are properly explained and examples chargen, it also means establishing in what way they coveting to share information. This principle needs to be plant in the practice of all the professionals delivering services to the families. Some families may wish to use an appropriately skilled interpreter. Some may want to share with the social worker the task of making indite records or complementary assessment forms. Other families may feel unable to say that written records disenfranchise them because of limited literacy skills.Services plans should be transparent and should clearly set out which agencies are involved, what is being provided, for how long and what are the consequences of not using the services. Plans need to be reviewed regularly and families need to know who has responsibility in multi-agency plans to deal with disagreement, to account for lapses in service provision and to ensure that reviews are held.For families the governments proposals under the Every Child Matters agenda create the possibility of improvements in accessing services across agencies. However, joint planning and commissioning will only be effective if parents, families and children are consulted about what services are expedient to them. Services delivered through extended schools and childrens centres need to be innovative and harness the skills of the third sector to deliver not only universal services but also services for children with additional and specialist needs.Social workers and their managers are well placed to drive forward more effective ways of working directly with families the risk is that processes designed to ensure accountability will create unnecessary barriers for skilled professionals who want to work alongside families to support them to find solutions.in 2000, the New Labour government published the Framework for the A ssessment of Children in Need and Their Families (DH et al 2000). The Framework was to be utilise to all assessments under the Children Act 1989, whether for children in need (s17) or where significant harm was suspected (s47). The Assessment Framework (DH et al 200010-16) sets out the future(a) key principles Assessments should be child centred, root in child development ecological in their approach ensure equality of opportunity involve working with children and families build on strengths as well as differentiate difficulties are inter-agency in their approach to assessment and the provision of services are a continuing process, not a single event are carried out in parallel with other action and providing services are grounded in evidence-based knowledge.Any assessment of a child and his family which aims to understand what is mishap to a child has to take account of a childs developmental needs, the parenting capacity to respond to those needs, and the wider family and envi ronmental factors. Together these form three systems whose interactions have direct impact on the current and long term wellbeing of a child. The Assessment Framework re ease ups a way of trying to capture the complexness of a childs world and beginning to construct a coherent approach to collecting and analysing information about each child.The Framework should be rooted in understandings of child development. Contemporary thinking about childrens needs has evolved over several decades and reflects a mixture of theoretical influences and evidence derived from research studies.Taylor (2004) identifies the following needs basic physical bursting charge, affection, security, stimulation, guidance, control and discipline, responsibility, independence. As assessment has start out increasingly rationalised, it has become more earthy to adopt a balance sheet approach, often couched in terms of risk factors i.e. the increased probability of a particular (negative) outcome and protectiv e factors that decrease its likelihood.An important factor behind the increasing interest in parenting has been a focus on the impact of mental health problems, substance misuse and domestic military force on parents and, in turn, children. Research in the 1990s suggested that these played an important role in many child welfare cases, especially when present in combination, but that they were neither well understood nor addressed in practice (Cleaver et al 1999). They are relevant in two main ways. First, background knowledge of the impact is an important factor in decision making and second, there may be particular implications for the process of assessment and how it is managed. While each of these areas has distinctive characteristics, there are also common treads. One is that assessment demands a careful balancing act to avoid over or under reaction.Thus, despite heightened risk to childrens welfare, it is important to recognise that those suffering from mental health and othe r problems do not inescapably make poor parents, and that the majority of their children grow up without major ill-effects (Cleaver, 2002).An adult who violently assaults another adult in the home is, in fact, also abusing children who may see, hear or be aware of that violence. Hughes, 1992, found that in 90 per cent of cases of domestic violence, children were in the same or the future(a) room. This indirect abuse, is a form of emotional abuse, and actually one of the more severe forms. (Bearing in mind that emotional abuse and neglect are closely related, we might also see it as neglect of the childs needs.) Children are exposed to feelings of terror, grief, impotence, and to the realisation that adults on whom they may rely for safety, security and protection are either, incapable of protecting even themselves, or, capable of dangerous violence towards those they are supposed to protect (Kelly, 199444). Since the implementation of the Adoption and Children Act in December 2005 , the Children Act 1989 definition of significant harm has expressly include impairment suffered from seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another.A all important(p) element of the Framework was to underline the interconnectedness of the three domains, drawing on the ecological possibleness of Bronfenbrenner (1979). In essence, Bronfenbrenner construes the factors influencing the childs development as a serial of four concentric circles, which he refers to as systems ranging from the childs immediate environment to the broadest social context. The microsystem describes any setting where the child is an active participant, typically the family, school, peer group or immediate neighbourhood. The mesosystem comprises relationships between microsystems, for example between home and school. Finally, the macrosystem comprises the broader social environment in which children and families live, including cultural values, customs, economy and laws.Arguably the most influential theoreti cal framework within assessment and child social care more broadly is that based on fixing. Originally derived from the work of Bowlby (1953), hamper theory emphasises the immenseness of relationships between children and parental figures, especially mothers. Bowlby was particularly touch with the negative consequences of lost or poor attachment which led to agnate deprivation. Subsequently, his work attracted criticism for its gendered assumptions and ethnocentricity, but having fallen out of fashion, attachment theory was rediscovered during the 1990s (Thoburn, 1999) and its magnificence was made explicit in the Assessment Framework.Fahlberg (1994) has specify attachment as an affectionate bond between two individuals that endures through space and time and serves to join them emotionally. She argues that the development of attachment occurs through a cycle of arousal and relaxation, wherein the child becomes aroused through needs such as food or comfort, but relaxes once t hese needs are met by the attachment figure. Repetition of the cycle develops trust and a instinct of security for the child. Fahlberg also points to a positive interaction cycle, where play and mode make interaction enjoyable and mutually rewarding and attachment is strengthened. The longer-term importance of attachment is that it should provide children with a secure base from which to explore the social world and give them an internal working model for relationships based on trust. Although open to change through later experiences, these models exert a unwavering and often enduring influence over the lives of children and adults (Howe,2001).Needless to say, such processes do not always follow this path and, while a nail down absence of attachment is rare, insecure attachment may affect up to half of the population (Howe,2001). Building on Ainsworth et als (1978) work, insecure attachments are customarily divided into three categories anxious avoidant (detached), anxious resis tant (ambivalent) and disorganised/controlling. Each is associated with specific attachment behaviours, such as the reaction to separation, and wider patterns of behaviour.Howe (2003) argues that attachment behaviours reflect how children make sense of adults both emotionally and cognitively and are typically adaptive responses to their care environment. Within assessment, therefore, attachment behaviours can give important insights into childrens well-being and development, while the theory may help to explain the factors that lie behind them and to gauge the potential for change. Understanding attachment is particularly pertinent when temporary or permanent removal of a child is being considered, both in terms of recognising the effects of removal and the importance of maintaining contact between children and birth family members including siblings (Sanders,2004). Information on attachment can be gleaned from interviews, direct work with children, from other professionals and per haps most importantly observation, but as Howe (2003) warns, assessing attachments is a complex task that requires experience and watchful handling.Explanatory accounts of child ill-treatment have emanated from all the major schools of psychology. Their firsthand focus rests with individual perpetrators, but to a greater or lesser extent they also address ideas of intergenerational transmission, examining the ways in which the puerility victims of maltreatment may become perpetrators as adults. Although they enjoy little support, there are also pre-psychological theories rooted in biology and ideas of instinct (Corby, 2005156-158).Psychodynamic perspectives (broadly derived from Freudian psychology) emphasise developmental stages and the formation of personality as these stages are negotiated (Mc Cluskey and Hooper, 2000). In relation to child maltreatment, attention has focused on how a parents own childhood may influence their capacity to recognise and meet childrens needs, whe ther they have acquired a rigid personality, become easily frustrated or have barrier in controlling aggression. This is evident in the case of Bethany where behaviour appears at first sight to be neglectful or abusive but seems in fact to be the result of genuine ignorance about the needs of a child or the role of a parent. Some adults may have lacked appropriate role models while growing up some are very isolated and have little access to sources of advice. When there seems to be a lack of knowledge or of parenting skills, an appropriate form of intervention is education the provision of advice, information, instruction or role models.Social learning theory focuses on how behaviour is learned through processes of observation, instruct and reinforcement. In line with the theory, intervention would focus on identifying these patterns and seeking to shift them through behavioural therapy, perhaps by working on avoiding triggers for maltreatment or reinforcing appropriate parental responses. Throughout her childhood, Bethany witnessed violence hence repetition the same behaviour as an adult.A basic feature of anti discriminatory practice is the ability to see that variation and oppression are so often central to the situations social workers encounter. The fact that social work service users are predominantly from disadvantaged groups is unlikely to be seen as a key issue. However, what anti discriminatory practice teaches us is that discrimination and oppression are vitally important matters and, if we are not attuned to recognising and contest discrimination, we run the risk of, at best condoning it and, at worst exacerbating and amplifying it through our own action.Overarching both the 1989 and the 2004 Children Act is the 1998 Human Rights Act which requires agencies with responsibilities for child health, education and welfare services to comply with the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights. Of particular relevance is condition 8, respect for private and family life. This Article does not give an absolute guarantee to family life and therefore to services to support a family to bring up their children. It is a qualified right, and the posit and its agencies have to balance the childs entitlement to grow up cared for by their family, who may need support services to do so, against the duty to protect the child and, where necessary following a fair and transparent process, to remove the child from the family.The duty on the Director of the Childrens Services to plan with other agencies to commission and provide support services to promote childrens wellbeing must comply with both international obligation and domestic law to ensure that service provision is non-discriminatory