ABSTRACT

The English child protection system continues to be the focus of national commentary in light of several high-profile deaths and the recently published reports from the Review of Children’s Social Care, and the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. Whilst narratives of ‘failure’, ‘betrayal’, and ‘scandalous incompetence’ perpetuate, these forgo consideration of the complexity of child protection work, nor do they acknowledge that during the COVID-19 ‘lockdowns’, social workers remained one of the few professional groups visiting vulnerable families at home. Moreover, of the recent accounts of the lived experience of social workers, these have omitted a specific overview of what it means to be a child protection practitioner. Drawing from an original ethnography of a statutory child protection team and supplemented by follow-up interviews, the article seeks to elucidate the long-standing lived experience of a cohort of child protection social workers. It highlights a ‘tendency’ to be the target of threats and intimidation and identifies other costs in the context of health and personal relationships. The article concludes that these findings could help us better understand child protection workforce instability and the system’s reliance on agency staff – both of which continue to be identified as contributory in child death tragedies.

摘要

鉴于几起引人注目的死亡事件以及儿童社会关怀审查和儿童保护实践审查小组最近发表的报告，英国儿童保护制度仍然是全国评论的焦点。虽然关于“失败”、“背叛”和“可耻的无能”的叙述持续存在，但这些说法没有考虑到儿童保护工作的复杂性，也没有承认在 COVID-19“封锁”期间，社会工作者仍然是为数不多的儿童保护工作之一。专业团体拜访家中的弱势家庭。此外，在最近对社会工作者生活经历的描述中，这些都省略了对儿童保护从业者意味着什么的具体概述。根据法定儿童保护小组的原始民族志并辅以后续访谈，本文旨在阐明一群儿童保护社会工作者的长期生活经验。它强调了成为威胁和恐吓目标的“倾向”，并确定了健康和个人关系方面的其他成本。文章的结论是，这些发现可以帮助我们更好地了解儿童保护劳动力的不稳定以及该系统对机构工作人员的依赖——这两点仍然被认为是造成儿童死亡悲剧的原因之一。