The Influence of Child Protection Orientation on Child Welfare Practice

This article reports the findings of the second part of a two-part research project examining the potential for social workers to make changes in their work with families and children. While social workers in the United Kingdom have been encouraged to shift from a child protection to a child welfare orientation in their practice, such changes have been hampered by professional and organisational concern to manage risk. The research explores the influence of a child protection orientation on practice in child welfare cases. The findings, from two file analyses and interviews with twenty-six social workers, indicate that such an influence is indeed apparent. This is evidenced in two ways; firstly patterns of practice in child welfare cases are similar to those in child protection cases. Secondly, while the majority of social workers express an attitudinal desire to move towards a child welfare orientation, they still prioritise the management of risk in their practice. It is argued that social workers need permission from their employing organisations to make changes in their practice. This, in turn, requires such organisations to state clear goals in line with a child welfare orientation and develop holistic strategies to achieve these.

Peacebuilding at the Local Level: Refugee Return to Prijedor'

During the 1992-95 war, Prijedor was synonymous with mass killing, ethnic cleansing and detention camps. A decade after the end of the war, international agencies consider this town to be an example of successful foreign intervention. Thousands of Muslim displaced persons (DPs) returned to their pre-war homes, mosques have been rebuilt, and hard-line Serb nationalists have lost much influence. How could Prijedor turn from a hopeless case of ethnic violence to an example of successful intervention? This essay argues that Prijedor's (relative) success is due more to the determination of Muslim DPs than to the international peacebuilding strategy. The initial post-Dayton international intervention exacerbated the problem of internal displacement, raised ethnic tensions and left Prijedor in the hands of the same indicted war criminals responsible for the war. Against the advice of international agencies, which feared a backlash among the Bosnian Serbs, in 1998 Muslim DPs began returning home. Eventually, large-scale return improved ethnic relations and helped marginalize Bosnian Serb extremists. The essay concludes by highlighting the lessons from Prijedor, and identifies the domestic and international contribution to Prijedor's post-settlement success.

A Model for Understanding Worker Premises in Child Protection

Considers the use of premises in child protection and offers a model how they are constructed to avoid bias

Child Protection Work and Family Support Practice in Five Family Centres

Academic interest in the work of family centres in the United Kingdom has largely been concerned with categorising the work of such centres in terms of issues of childcare ideology, working practices and degree of service user control. Meanwhile, the re-focusing of child protection services in order to develop child welfare services has largely dominated childcare social work in recent years, with scant attention paid to the role of family centres in relation to this debate. This study is concerned with examining the perspectives of staff and service users in five 'client focussed' family centres in Northern Ireland in relation to how child protection issues are understood and dealt with. It was found that staff enter into negotiations with both referrers and service users to conceptually reframe child protection work as family support practice. This leads to the development of partnership relationships between staff and service users based upon mutual high regard. The work of such centres leaves them well placed to provide integrated services to children in need in line with current government priorities, but could leave some children vulnerable where child protection issues are not amenable to conceptual reframing along family support lines.

Chronic child abuse: The characteristics and careers of children caught in the child protection system

The introduction of the Quality Protects initiative in England and the focus on performance management has challenged social services departments to examine the systems, processes and outcomes for children who have their name on a child protection register. Research indicates that approximately one-quarter of the situations in which children are registered could be described as chronic—that is, they remain on the child protection register for significant periods of time, experience more than one period of registration or suffer a further incident of significant harm whilst subject to a child protection plan. In this article, the findings from a research study conducted into this group of vulnerable children are reported, focusing on the characteristics of the children and their families, and their careers in the child protection system. The paper concludes with observations about the weak conceptualization of performance management and the need to recognize the complexity of the factors that influence children’s careers in the child protection system.