Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Trouble ahead? Contending discourses in child protection
- three Building better people: policy aspirations and family life
- four Family experiences of care and protection services: the good, the bad and the hopeful
- five A social model for protecting children: changing our thinking?
- six A social model: experiences in practice
- seven Domestic abuse: a case study
- eight Crafting different stories: changing minds and hearts
- nine Concluding thoughts
- References
- Index
four - Family experiences of care and protection services: the good, the bad and the hopeful
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Trouble ahead? Contending discourses in child protection
- three Building better people: policy aspirations and family life
- four Family experiences of care and protection services: the good, the bad and the hopeful
- five A social model for protecting children: changing our thinking?
- six A social model: experiences in practice
- seven Domestic abuse: a case study
- eight Crafting different stories: changing minds and hearts
- nine Concluding thoughts
- References
- Index
Summary
Being unable to tell your story is a living death, and sometimes a literal one. If no one listens when you say your ex-husband is trying to kill you, if no one believes you when you say you are in pain, if no one hears you when you say help, if you don't dare say help, if you have been trained not to bother people by saying help (Solnit, 2017: 19, emphasis in original).
Introduction
Stories of pain, hurt, betrayal and violence are told to professionals everyday and, indeed, are heard by them often as they struggle with huge caseloads and worries of their own at home and at work. However, a key theme of this book, and central to its mission, is a concern that the language and theoretical and practice tools available to them are impoverished and increasingly inadequate. This is partly due to contemporary challenges in terms of funding of course. We have already highlighted how those services and families who need the most have had the most taken away since 2010. But it is also due to the inadequacy of a model that translates need to risk routinely, colonises a variety of sorrows and troubles within a child protection frame, and has abandoned or lost a sense of the contexts, economic and social, in which so many are living lives of quiet, or not so quiet, desperation.
This chapter brings some of these lives into sharp relief. It has two purposes in the context of this book: first to shine a light on lived realities but second to offer some really vivid examples of how we might begin the process of designing services with families rather than for them. Thus it acts as an essential bridge to the subsequent chapters where a social model is fleshed out across policy and practice contexts.
The chapter draws on a number of studies conducted by the authors, in particular a detailed study of families and their experiences of welfare services, hereafter referred to as Study One (Morris et al, 2018b) and an enquiry on the role of the social worker in adoption, ethics and human rights (Study Two), which explored the perspectives of birth families, adoptive parents and adopted young people (Featherstone et al, 2018).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Protecting ChildrenA Social Model, pp. 67 - 82Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018