Kate Morris, Brid Featherstone and Sue White are right to
suggest that we need to question the ways in which we protect children. And
they are right to consider alternative approaches. In their Guardian article
today they make some telling points.
I was particularly struck by their account of contemporary
practice reality for child protection social workers: dashing from family to
family, visit to visit, completing forms, directing parents to change their
behaviour or to expel abusive partners immediately or by next week at the
latest. It is a grim vision, but it has the ring of truth.
However, I do not think that in the end they deal satisfactorily with the inherent
contradictions with which we are all faced. They write:
“However tempting it looks in the face of another tragedy, there is no easy moral mandate to rescue more and more children from impoverished families and communities. We need to understand and work with the relational ties of blood, kin, friendship, place and community. These are the primary contexts for the resolution of children's needs.”
Progressive as this argument sounds it does not deal
effectively with the dilemma that confronts every social worker in every encounter
that she or he has with abused and neglected children and their carers. In an
ideal world ‘ties of blood, kin, friendship, place and community’ would be
capable of being woven to prevent the catastrophic breakdown of care. But in
the real world brutal and unrelenting social forces often result in these ties
being irretrievably severed. The hopelessly addicted mother of Hamzah Khan or
the viciously sadistic carers of Daniel Pelka are not easily seen as candidates
for rehabilitation and support, no matter how optimistic the observer. And false optimism
blinds us to the terrible dangers they pose. So for a particular child on a
particular day there may be no meaningful choice between kinship and community
on the one hand and state intervention on the other. The only choice may be that
between the child facing continuing maltreatment in the home or being rescued
and protected.
Sadly there is a stark analogy. We cannot transfer resources
from the emergency ambulance service before road safety campaigns have been
effective in reducing the number of accidents; at least not unless we are
prepared to leave victims to die by the roadside.
