Child Protection In Britain: When will they ever learn? By Lynne Wrennall & Charles Pragnell (original) (raw)
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This report summarises the presentations, discussion and emerging themes in child protection from two four-nations seminars hosted by The University of Edinburgh/NSPCC Child Protection Research Centre. These events were designed to create a space to reflect, share knowledge and debate developing issues in child protection across the UK. Invited speakers and representatives included senior level policy makers, inspectors, voluntary sector managers, academics and practitioners from each part of the UK. This report offers: an overview of developments in child protection across the UK; information about the Munro Review and the resulting initiatives; a synopsis of the seminar presentations focusing in particular on structural change, new developments and emerging issues. Finally, the report consolidates information from across the four parts of the UK, draws out themes of commonality and difference and identifies areas that may warrant further consideration.
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Although numerous international studies point to large variations in child welfare interventions, comparative analysis has tended to focus either solely on England or the UK as a whole, discounting differences across the four UK countries. This paper compares trends in national statistics relating to the operation of child protection systems across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland between 2004/5 and 2013/14. Despite a number of legislative, operational and definitional differences between nations, a number of trends are apparent. All systems show an increasing orientation towards child protection as evidenced by rising rates of child protection investigation and children subject to child protection planning. Increasingly, this relates to emotional abuse and involves younger children aged 0-4 years. However, the way cases are processed can differ with only one in ten referrals resulting in a child protection investigation in Northern Ireland compared to one in five in England. Potential reasons for these differences are discussed and questions raised as to why, more than quarter century after the introduction of the Children Act 1989, we still have no clear picture of the circumstances of families who come into contact with social services or the services provided to support them.
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This paper addresses the questions: what is wrong with the Child Protection system? What are the indicators of the need for change? Which changes will solve the problem? In this paper, I intend to argue that the Child Protection system is harming children, families and communities. The failure to appropriately act on genuine reports of abuse and the pursuit of false allegations, are seen as two sides of the same coin. This is the problem of too many false positives and false negatives. The causes are inter-related and the solutions must focus on both sides of the problem.
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This paper draws on the results of a commissioned systematic map of UK child protection empirical research published between 2010 and 2014. It analyses current patterns in child protection research in relation to three variables – disciplinary background of authors, types of maltreatment examined, and focus of the research – and considers the relationship between these. It finds first authors’ disciplines to be reliable indicators of both the focus and topic of the research, with the dominant fields of psychology, medicine, and social work addressing respectively the long term outcomes of sexual abuse, the short term outcomes of physical abuse, and the care system’s response to child maltreatment. The proportion of research dedicated to specific types of maltreatment appears to depend on factors other than their real-world prevalence. Instead, definitional issues and ease of access to research participants appearing to be more influential in determining the topic of the research. UK...
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