Regimes of Risk and Family Inclusion in Child Protection Practice
Contemporary child protection practice is required to meet and is shaped by a policy agenda that on the one hand promotes and requires partnership and participation ,of family and community yet on the other hand views childhood as a site of vulnerability and what has been termed “risk anxiety”.
This paradox converges around family-based social work in child protection and brings an inherent conflict into practice, which must be dealt with in everyday relations between social workers and client families.
Current child protection social work increasingly emphasises a family strengths and resources focus yet regimes of risk assessment and vulnerability criteria, deficit models are invoked at the systems level. Additionally there is recognition of the growing fragmentation of services and that the groups of families and children most likely to come to attention of social work services are already facing marginalisation and exclusion on other levels.
This paper examines the need to unpack and reconsider the uncritical acceptance of either approach as a child protection response. The analysis rests on research studies of iniatives in Aotearoa New Zealand child protection: the Family Group Conferencing Model and latterly the Strengthening Families Iniative.
The overall aim is to identify the potency of these models especially specific practices with families , but also to acknowledge the contradictions inherent in engaging in such social work within a policy regime of risk rather than need.