Listen to thisIn last month's column, I noted how dominant discourses determine, very powerfully, what we're allowed to say and what we're not allowed to say. However, I'm encouraged by Moss and Petrie's (2002) suggestion that, in relation to children and notions of childhood, we need to “put a stutter” into dominant narratives. So I'm going to use this column, over the next few months to introduce a stutter into that most dominant of dominant narratives, “child protection.”
For a good while now, the very mention of “child protection” has got my hackles up. And that's not the easiest of things to say. There's an industry out there that has staked a claim on 'protecting' children. To question the very basis of their position leaves one open to accusations of not caring for children's wellbeing or worse . The accusations will be made in the censorious and superior tone of those who assume a moral authority to what they do and say. To question child protection can be akin to taking issue with motherhood and apple pie.
Before I go any further, let me just say that I trained in child protection about 12 years ago and was enthused by the course. It acknowledged context and complexity and was rooted in an overall concern for the welfare of children and youth. At that time, child protection seemed to mark a departure from a past where children didn't count sufficiently, and it offered a potentially progressive and welfare oriented framework within which to conceptualise work with children and youth.
However, over the past decade or so, child protection has come to define social work with children and families, to the point where wider welfare considerations have become subsumed beneath predominant pressures to investigate and to assess and manage risk. Where there was once dialogue there is now dogma; where there was practice wisdom, there is now prescription; where there was once assessment there is now investigation (and the ubiquitous 'risk assessment'). Good practitioners are uncomfortable about so much of the child protection agenda. But the bandwagon rolls on and the procedures manual gets fatter and fatter. And the good practitioners leave in their droves, frustrated, burnt out, but often without the language or the conceptual knowledge to challenge the very premises upon which the whole 'child protection' edifice is built.
I'm prompted to write this now as a result of events in Edinburgh, my home city, over the past few weeks. A couple of years ago, a ten week old baby died at the hands of his brain damaged father while his drug addicted mother was at the chemist collecting her methadone prescription. It was a tragic case; one of the ten or so deaths of children at the hands of their parents that happen in Scotland every year. However, this death resulted in an inquiry chaired by a senior lawyer. The inquiry reported a couple of weeks ago, to devastating effect. It identified flaws at almost every level in the agencies involved. The press and the politicians bayed for blood. Two social workers were suspended; others had their duties restricted and the Director resigned. A cloak of despair has settled over social work in Edinburgh.
Now there may have been procedural mistakes in this case. However, just about every social worker I know looks at the report and can acknowledge, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” When lawyers, unversed in the rawness of human nature, turn over stones in the murky ground of child protection, they'll find worms. That's the problem; the kind of work social workers do is often murky. That doesn't detract from the need for them to demonstrate competence in what they do. However, in working with children and families, they are faced with complex and often conflicting imperatives and judgement calls. And they're going to get some of them wrong. Social work as a profession does itself no favours when it is complicit in promises to protect that it can't deliver on. Faith in the capacity of ever more elaborate sets of procedures to protect children, assumes a rationality in human nature that just doesn't exist. It also leaves untouched the root cause of children being abused. It's surely no coincidence that nearly all of the child deaths we hear about involve economically disadvantaged, drug addicted or otherwise socially or emotionally impaired individuals. The child protection agenda in its present state, risks prioritising the policing of such families over questioning the systems that contribute to their plight, or supporting them in their invariably genuine, if not always successful, attempts to ensure better futures for their children.
One of the least savoury aspects of this case has been the witch-hunt that has followed in its wake. It is characterised by an alarming ignorance of the lives and situations of the people in Edinburgh, who don't inhabit the comfortable worlds of the politicians and the headline writers, those who would have us remove the children of anyone who didn't fit with their conception of “normal.” Perhaps we'll see them all offer to become foster parents to care for the children of all these “junkies” as they see fit to label them. Somehow I doubt it, so social workers will go on patching up family situations that they're not comfortable with, desperately hoping that it's not their name on the front pages of the paper next time a tragedy happens. And in all of this bloodlust, no-one seems to pause to consider the kind of agonies that the parents of this little boy must be going through.
If child protection is to have any meaning, beyond the narrow confines of investigation and blame, it has to be rooted in genuine debate about the moral and ethical principles that frame our views of children, youth and their families. It distorts the whole notion of what child protection could be about, when it is used to beat people up, as has been the case in this and other situations. “Child protection” as it is currently constructed, has lost its way. I'll try and develop some of the reasons why I think so over the next few months.
Reference
Moss, P. and Petrie, P. (2002) From Children's Services to Children's Spaces. London: Routledge/ Falmer
