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Chapters 1, 3 and 5 available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND license.
Safeguarding adults at risk of abuse or neglect is a core area of social work practice but knowledge of how social workers make adult safeguarding decisions is limited.
Applying recent sociological and ethnographic research to this area for the first time, this book considers how adult safeguarding practice is developing, with a focus on risk management. The author explores how social workers conduct safeguarding adults assessments, work with multiple agencies and involve service users in risk decisions. The book is essential reading for those wishing to understand how risk and uncertainty are managed within frontline adult social work and how current practice can be improved.
This chapter concludes by identifying how the findings relate to previous academic work on social work and risk. The chapter revisits some of the key arguments about social work and risk and uses the framework of risk work to give a more nuanced account of how risk knowledge, interventions and social relations affect adult safeguarding practice. The chapter ends by setting out policy and practice recommendations.
This chapter provides social workers’ accounts of doing adult safeguarding work with service users, family carers and paid carers. It highlights social workers’ understanding and use of risk assessment tools and shows how these were used to document who should take responsibility for measuring and monitoring risks. Social workers indicated the need to ensure service users’ immediate safety when doing adult safeguarding work. They also highlighted difficulties with engaging service users in safeguarding work and conducting this work in the time available. Key aspects of working with service users are highlighted, including explaining adult safeguarding, enabling risk taking, assessing what is important to the person and educating the person about abuse and neglect. Approaches to family carers are described, with social workers emphasising supportive or assertive approaches. Finally, the chapter focuses on how social workers engaged with paid carers in the community or in care homes, showing that safeguarding approaches were predominantly enforced through compliance with paperwork.
This chapter sets out the case for exploring how social workers understand and manage risk and uncertainty when doing adult safeguarding work. It provides a brief overview of safeguarding duties under the Care Act 2014 and related policy, and explains how the Mental Capacity Act 2005 is relevant. The chapter also describes the ethnographic research methods used in the study and provides details about the social workers and local authorities taking part in the research.
This chapter builds on the findings from Chapter 3, which established that new legal criteria under the Care Act 2014 and related policies were used as the central source of risk knowledge. It highlights the tensions which emerged when social workers attempted to apply this knowledge in practice. Austerity policies were seen as an impediment to safeguarding services being delivered well. The chapter highlights social workers’ views that safeguarding had become ‘the last stop’ and that blockages within local authorities reduced the efficiency of services. It also shows that social relations with other professionals were limited in the context of austerity and that safeguarding principles were reframed by social workers to provide a safeguarding service within funding constraints.
This chapter considers how adult safeguarding has come to be viewed as an issue needing a policy response. Drawing on theory from social policy, the chapter shows how, over recent decades, adult abuse and neglect have come to be viewed as a social problem. Beginning in the 1960s, the chapter charts campaigns by members of the public and professional groups and explains how current safeguarding laws and policies in England evolved.
This chapter reports on how referrals and assessments were managed by social workers in the three local authorities in the study. It identifies how new legal criteria under the Care Act 2014 and related policies were used as the central source of risk knowledge. The chapter also describes the two intervention models used by the local authorities. The use of information and communications technology is discussed, highlighting that these systems were used both to retrieve risk knowledge and to organise interventions. The chapter also shows that where tensions between professional values existed, professional discretion and team culture were used to supplement or override existing systems. Finally, the chapter shows how social relations between social workers and other professional groups were managed when conducting safeguarding enquiries. It highlights a dominant concern among social workers about ‘inappropriate referrals’ and reports a divergence of opinion as to whether local authorities should be encouraging or discouraging other agencies to make safeguarding referrals.
This chapter introduces sociological theories of risk and uncertainty. It sets out Beck’s theory of risk society as well as the literature on governmentality, cultural theories of risk, and risk work. Key themes around risk and uncertainty from the social work literature are also introduced. Using the framework of risk work, the chapter reviews what current research tells us about how social workers manage risk and uncertainty.
The four domains of Contextual Safeguarding (CS) have provided the framework for what we are doing to respond to extra-familial harm (EFH). The evidence in this book indicates that they may not always provide enough of a framework to protect against problematic practice within child protection. In response, the five values of CS provide guidance on how we can do CS. Drawing on bell hooks’s (2001) love ethic, this chapter explores the five values of CS: collaboration, ecological, rights-based, strengths-based and evidence-informed, arguing that CS aims to create societies where children can know love. Drawing on findings from each chapter, it explores the need for love to be shown towards children impacted by EFH and practitioners working to protect them.
How do we respond to harm faced by young people beyond their front doors? Can practitioners keep young people safe at school, in their neighbourhoods or with their friends when social care systems are designed to work with families?
The Contextual Safeguarding approach has transformed how policy makers, social care leaders, practitioners and researchers understand harm that happens to young people in their communities and what is required to respond. Since 2015 it has been tested across the UK and internationally. This book shares stories from child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation and peer violence about what has been learnt on this journey.
For anyone interested in how we safeguard young people beyond their front doors, this book shows how much we have achieved and raises big questions about what more we need to do to ensure young people are safe – whatever the context.
