Social Work Home Visits to Children and Families in the UK: A Foucauldian Perspective

Abstract

The home visit is at the heart of social work practice with children and families; it is what children and families' social workers do more than any other single activity (except for recording), and it is through the home visit that assessments are made on a daily basis about risk, protection and welfare of children. And yet it is, more than any other activity, an example of what Pithouse has called an ‘invisible trade’: it happens behind closed doors, in the most secret and intimate spaces of family life. Drawing on conceptual tools associated with the work of Foucault, this article sets out to provide a critical, chronological review of research, policy and practice on home visiting. We aim to explain how and in what ways changing discourses have shaped the emergence, legitimacy, research and practice of the social work home visit to children and families at significant time periods and in a UK context. We end by highlighting the importance for the social work profession of engagement and critical reflection on the identified themes as part of their daily practice.

Home level bureaucracy: moving beyond the ‘street’ to uncover the ways that place shapes the ways that community public health nurses implement domestic abuse policy

“…As street-level encounters for disadvantaged families move increasingly from the desk, clinic and office to the family home (Wacquant 2009, Crossley 2016, Winter and Cree 2016, this study illuminates the ways that working in this intimate space shapes the work of HVs as they deliver a 'routine enquiry' into DA. The use of discretion is clearly evident in the extent to which the policy mandate is implemented and yet this study suggests that the 'decision' of HVs to use discretion is much more nuanced than the existing literature would suggest.…”

“…As Crossley (2016) and others have pointed out, while the implicit assumptionand focus of much empirical research is that street-level encounters happen at an office desk in a government building (Fletcher 2011), increasingly the site of government intervention into the lives of the disadvantaged families is in the home (Wacquant 2009, Crossley 2016, Upton 2016. Taking a Foucauldian approach and widening the lens beyond disadvantaged families, Winter and Cree (2016) likewise track over time the historical progression of the state into the intimate space of family homes through the practice of social work.…”

Constructing service discourses in Lithuanian family social work

“…There is also a need for social work research that will explore how families themselves, throughout their life stories, talk about the particular risk of social exclusion. Research about service discourses could be carried out, involving social workers' home visits to children and families (Winter & Cree, 2015), where contemporary discourses' evidence-based measurements and relationship-based practices could be analysed. Menéndez et al (2015) conducted research about the assessment of the level of risk of families who were receiving protection services.…”

From communication to co‐operation: Reconceptualizing social workers' engagement with children

“…It is only relatively recently, however, that research has begun to make more visible the nature of everyday communicative encounters in practice. The TLC research informing this paper (Winter and Cree, ; Winter et al, ), along with Ferguson's (, , , and ) studies of home visits, are two major bodies of research that have begun to unlock and reveal this hidden professional world. In the case of the TLC project, the findings have informed the development of an ecological model of communication (Winter et al, ), as well as evidence‐informed conceptual ideas that focus on specific aspects of encounters, including emotional labour (Winter et al, ), children's agency (Morrison et al, ), and social pedagogic practices (Ruch et al, ).…”