Poverty is the problem – not parents: so tell me, child protection worker, how can you help?

Abstract

Families who attract the attention of child protection services most often have ongoing lived experiences of poverty, gender-based domestic and family violence, problematic substance use and, sometimes, formally diagnosed mental health conditions. Without broader contextual knowledge and understanding, particularly regarding ongoing poverty, decision-making by child protection workers often leads to the removal of children, while the family’s material poverty and experiences of violence remain unaddressed. Case studies are a common tool to succinctly capture complex contexts. In this article, we make explicit, through case examples and analysis, how poverty is almost always the backdrop to the presence of worrying risk factors before and during child protection intervention. Further, we expose the existential poverty that parents live with after they lose their children into care and which invariably exacerbates material poverty. In the final section, we consider the multi-faceted organisational poverty that blights the work environment of child protection workers, and we suggest strategies for improved practice with families living in poverty.

Battling parenting: The consequences of secure care interventions on parents

“…Studies into state interventions in family life and the positions of parents exemplify the growing disparity between everyday worlds of parents and social welfare's assumptions about the sources of family troubles. Poverty (Bennett et al, 2020; Gupta, 2017), ethnicity and race (Gupta & Featherstone, 2016; Ribbens McCarthy & Gillies, 2018) are some of the major social factors that tend to be ignored in cases where parents are deemed incapable of attending to their own children.…”

“…These policies and practices conceive of children as not only malleable but also uprooted from their social contexts (Morris et al, 2017). Structural forces conditioning family and childrearing practices are hardly recognized by social workers (Bennett et al, 2020), and even if recognized, these forces are not taken into account in social work practice (Walsh & Mason, 2018). For instance, social workers tend to privilege mothers over fathers by associating parenthood with motherhood (Morris et al, 2017; Walsh & Mason, 2018).…”

“…The institutional and relational dimensions of secure care are visible and prevalent not only in the lives of the placed children. The families, and very often parents, are at the forefront of what has been identified as collateral consequences , which indicates the extent to which child welfare interventions into family affects parents and their lived experiences (Bennett et al, 2020; Broadhurst & Mason, 2017, 2020; Lewis & Brady, 2018). Drawing on that body of research, this article focuses on the institutional and societal structures affecting parents and their parenting practices during secure care placements.…”

“…Although this freedom occurs within the frames of specific socio-cultural context, parents can discover their own ways of parenting and relating to their own children. Thus, we call for a greater acceptance and recognition of various types of family and family practices among welfare professionals who are in contact with parents to institutionally placed children.Parents' relations with CWS, and their ability to negotiate their place and position in the process of institutional placement of their children, are highly embedded in intersecting social structures (e.g.,Bennett et al, 2020;Gupta & Featherstone, 2016;Ribbens McCarthy & Gillies, 2018). This study draws attention to class, ethnicity, and gender and the ways that these systems of power relations impinge on the parents' ways of managing the placement of their child and the subsequent contacts with CWS.…”

Child poverty and children entering care in England, 2015–20: a longitudinal ecological study at the local area level

“…12 , 13 Internationally, qualitative research sheds light on how poverty can create need and draw child protection concerns. 14 However, taken by itself, UK evidence is less robust. 12 Although many UK studies report a link between socioeconomic conditions and child protection intervention rates, poor quality routine data, restricted statistical analyses, and a dearth of more up-to-date studies might obscure the strength of the broader evidence base and hinder policy action.…”