Child Protection Practice

Child protection or, as Ferguson states, now often fashionably referred to as ‘safeguarding’ has been around for a long time. His book begins by providing a historical analysis of the origins and development of child protection policy and practices from the nineteenth century to the present. Thereafter, it looks in detail at the practice from the initial suspicion of child abuse and referral to social work, through investigation and assessment, planning and formal inter-agency work, to longer-term therapeutic and support work with children and families. Fifteen engaging chapters cover topics such as home visits and the practice issues involved in seeing bedrooms and other intimate spaces. Others include relating to children, the importance of the car for therapeutic practice, working with parents and using ‘good authority’. All have something important and interesting to say as well as portraying much of the reality of the actual day-to-day job. In pursuing his argument, Ferguson draws on three strands of theory. First, there is relationship-based practice, a psycho-social approach that focuses on the interactions of external factors that influence people's life chances and the social conditions they live in and their internal emotional worlds. Second, there is the new interest in the social sciences in movement, the study of ‘mobilities’. Movement, potential movement and blocked movement are central to child protection in issues such as whether workers move towards children to properly see, hear and touch (despite current societal questioning about the latter). Third, the place of objects or things, ‘material culture’ if you will, in everyday life is important. This is because we might shape homes but they also shape us and how we live, and practitioners need to understand this in order to makes sense of what is going on in them. All three strands provide a way ‘of understanding the lived experience of doing social work and child protection as it needs to be done, while on the move’ (p. 11).