Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services: Explaining the ‘inverse intervention law’

Abstract

Attempts to record, understand and respond to variations in child welfare and protection reporting, service patterns and outcomes are international, numerous and longstanding.Reframing such variations as an issue of inequity between children and between families opens the way to a new approach to explaining the profound difference in intervention rates between and within countries and administrative districts. Recent accounts of variation have frequently been based on the idea that there is a binary divide between bias and risk (or need).Here we propose seeing supply (bias) and demand (risk) factors as two aspects of a single system, both framed, in part, by social structures. A recent finding from a study of intervention rates in England, the 'inverse intervention law', is used to illustrate the complex ways in which a range of factors interact to produce intervention rates. In turn, this analysis raises profound moral, policy, practice and research questions about current child welfare and child protection services.

The trouble with thresholds: Rationing as a rational choice in child and family social work

“…For every child subject to a child protection plan in the United Kingdom, it is estimated that there are likely to be around eight other children who have suffered maltreatment (Radford et al, ). Additionally, the work of Bywaters et al () has highlighted the inconsistency of responses based on neighbourhood characteristics and national child welfare system in each of the four countries in the United Kingdom. Parton () has highlighted that in the past decade, the child welfare policy has been driven by the rhetoric of blame and failure, reinforced by successive pronouncements in England from government ministers that the “essential duty” for local authorities is “to protect vulnerable children,” undermining the ethos of the “Every Child Matters” policy agenda of the previous decade, with a refocusing from “every child” to the “vulnerable child.”…”

On the margins of the child protection system: creating space for relational social work practice

“…A rich literature is emerging on how threshold decisions between CP and Child in Need are made (e.g. Sheppard, 2009;Platt & Turney, 2013;Bywaters et al, 2015). Many academics have criticized this process and its consequences.…”

Poverty, child abuse and neglect: patterns of cost and spending

“…(looked-after children) made up the largest proportion of this figure, a group who have long-standing associations with conditions of poverty (Bebbington and Miles, 1989;Bywaters et al, 2014aBywaters et al, , 2014bBywaters et al, , 2015Bywaters et al, , 2016Pelton, 2015). Indeed, Bramley and Watkins' (2008: 15) evidence confirmed 'the character of children's PSS as a service which is almost dominated by the effects of child/family poverty', indicating a relationship between the costs of child poverty and CAN.…”