Full Description
Despite its huge public profile, surprisingly little is known about child protection work. Discussion focuses on failures that result in children dying, or on what social workers cannot do, due to bureaucratic pressures and limited time. This book examines in detail how social workers can use the time they do have to relate to children and families, make child protection work and create meaningful change.
Featuring:
• Detailed examination of real-world child protection case studies based on original research;
• A new vocabulary for understanding and improving social work and relationship-based practice;
• New insights into how to provide effective staff support and supervision;
• Original integration of psychoanalytic and sociological perspectives; and
• Practical tools for navigating challenges such as working with infants and managing hostile relationships.
Sure to become a classic social work text, this book explores how helpful relationships are made and sustained, and how they can be made better. It provides a new 'forward-facing' approach, with practical and theoretical insights into how, and under what organisational conditions, relationship-based practice and child protection can be made to work.
Contents
Introduction: Bringing child protection to life
1. The Child Protection System: the making of practice
2. Starting Relationships: Investigating and assessing child protection concerns
3. Relationships Over Time: Care, holding and reliability
4. Automated Practice: The invisible, unheld child
5. Disorganised Practice: Chaotically thought about and unsafe children
6. The Intimate Pattern: Seen, heard and held children
7. Hands-On Practice: Making relationships with babies and young children
8. Holding Relationships: Helping parents, families and enabling change
9. Hostile Relationships: Conflict and good authority in working with involuntary service users
10. Close or Distant?: Relational styles in child protection work
11. Crafting Relational Spaces: Digital, outdoor and mobile practices
12. Beyond Reflective Practice: Help with thinking and non-thinking
13. Holding Environments: Supervision and live organisational support for relational practice
14. Making Child Protection Work Well
Appendix A: Methodology and the research studies
Appendix B: The Practice Cycle Worksheet
