Child Maltreatment in Western China: Ethnic Disparities, Poverty-related Adversity and Policy Deficiency

Children’s participation in the child protection system: Are young people from poor families less likely to be heard?

“…Family migration is not conceptually related to a lack of autonomy in the way that family poverty is, which invalidates the argument that workers will view the case primarily as a protection/provision case rather than a participation case. Second, although family migration arguably plays a part in folk theories about the likelihood of child abuse and neglect, and there is some evidence for statistical associations between prevalence of child maltreatment and ethnicity (Rouland, Vaithianathan, Wilson & Putnam-Hornstein, 2019;Wan, Ye & Pei, 2021), the assumption of a relationship between migration and child maltreatment may be fraught with the fear of stigmatization, particularly for social workers, who belong to what is generally assumed to be a socially progressive profession. Therefore, it seems less likely that case workers will see family migration per se as a plausible argument for an intervention in the best interests of the child, and workers will therefore perceive a need to collect information from other sources, including asking the child about his or view.…”