THREE The child’s voice in the child protection system Jenny Clifton Eileen Munro wrote in her final report that a child-centred system must recognise that children have rights, including the right to participate in decisions that concern them (Munro, 2011b). Children have made clear that participation is not just about being asked for their views: it is about understanding and being understood, about knowing that their voices have really been heard and how they have been considered. At the heart of this is respect for the child and their experience of
mistakes in the Norwegian child protection system at three levels: the state, the court and locally. To establish an overview of the discourse on errors and mistakes, we have examined national audits and reports by regulatory agencies. The various regulatory agencies in Norway employ two main types of oversight: first, centrally planned, countrywide audits that examine predefined areas of child protection practice within a sample of agencies, and second, local incident-based audits and inspections that address individual agencies or specific cases. It is then up to the
SIX Older children and the child protection system Gwyther Rees and Mike Stein Child protection of young people aged 11 to 17 is a surprisingly unexplored issue. In this chapter we review two recent research studies in England that aimed to address this gap. We present the key findings from these projects and consider their implications in the light of the Munro Review of Child Protection and the government’s response. The Munro Review itself acknowledges some of the potentially distinctive aspects of child protection issues in relation to this particular
PART I Adoption from care in risk- oriented child protection systems
PART II Adoption from care in family service- oriented child protection systems
understanding how structural inequalities shape young people’s experiences of significant harm beyond their families, and how these inequalities mediate the system response (that is, government policy, the child protection system and its multi-agency partners) to young people who have been harmed. In this chapter, we consider how CS could support us to understand structural inequality and systemic harm when thinking about extra-familial abuse in adolescence. We propose that the framework and its accompanying methods, which have to date considered the contexts of young people
77 Critical and Radical Social Work • vol 4 • no 1 • 77–91 • © Policy Press 2015 • #CRSW Print ISSN 2049 8608 • Online ISSN 2049 8675 • http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/204986015X14502659300361 article What about my dad? Black fathers and the child protection system Anna Gupta, anna.gupta@rhul.ac.uk Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Brid Featherstone, b.m.featherstone@hud.ac.uk University of Huddersfield, UK This article explores social work practice with black fathers within the child protection and family court systems through the analysis of case studies
163 Families, Relationships and Societies • vol 5 • no 1 • 163–72 • © Policy Press 2016 • #FRS Print ISSN 2046 7435 • Online ISSN 2046 7443 • http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/204674316X14540714620166 open space Giving poverty a voice: families’ experiences of social work practice in a risk-averse child protection system Anna Gupta,1 anna.gupta@rhul.ac.uk, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Hannah Blumhardt, blumhardt.hannah@gmail.com, Independent researcher, New Zealand ATD Fourth World, London, UK This article explores family members’ perspectives on
The number of children entering the child protection system has risen dramatically in the last three years with implications for children’s services and partner agencies. This timely volume takes a critical look at the impact of the Munro Review (2011) on child protection and the Government’s response. It looks at questions including how effective Local Safeguarding Children Boards are in providing the necessary scrutiny to ensure children are safe, how the early offer of help at local level might reduce the numbers of children at the critical end of the spectrum and whether reducing regulation from the centre will result in better outcomes for the most vulnerable? Moreover, it also considers those young people who traditionally bypass child protection services but remain at risk of harm. These are critical questions for both policy and practice in understanding the reforms Munro states are required. Contributions from leading experts working in the child protection system review current safeguarding policy and explore the future after Munro.
Four years after the publication of the influential Munro Report (2011) this important publication draws together a range of experts working in the field of child protection to critically examine what impact the reforms have had on multi-agency child protection systems in this country, at both local and national level. With a particular emphasis on early intervention, vulnerable adolescents and effective multi-agency responses to young people at risk, specialists from policy and practice alongside academics in different areas of children’s services consider progress in improving child protection arrangements, in transforming services and the challenges that remain. Local Safeguarding Children Boards (LSCBs), the statutory bodies responsible for local scrutiny of child protection arrangements, are now subject to Ofsted inspection and this publication considers the role of LSCBs, how services should respond to the most vulnerable children and what ‘good’ services look like.
