Special Issue: Child Protection Vocabulary in Professional Judgement – Fit for Purpose?

Abstract

Without a doubt, the pressure that front-line practitioners work under to ensure they accurately assess and balance the need for professional intervention when confronted with presenting complexity of children's lives is extremely stressful (Kettle, 2018). The complexity of child protection work often requires significant professional judgement to be drawn upon to make safe and sensitive decisions, most often through the use of discretion, intuition, and analytical thinking (Nyathi, 2019). Since the Seebohm Report (1968) in the United Kingdom (UK), a increasing demand for audit-centricity in safeguarding practice has premised for clearly documented decision-making processes including the written descriptions of professional judgement but this is far from simplistic in practice (Broadhurst et al., 2010). Since the 1980s, Taylor and White ( 2001) have noted the fine dynamism between knowledge, truth, and reflexivity in social work professional judgements, remarking that the nature of safeguarding assessment is as much a practical-moral activity as it is a technical-rational one, especially on the common basis of incomplete, inconclusive and contested information (Helm, 2016). Taylor and White's observations of this dynamism remains a contemporary issue in safeguarding practice, yet we can extend this dynamic issue to all front-line practice, especially as newer forms of child maltreatment become recognised as social and legal problems (e.g. County Lines).Whilst professional judgement is almost an exclusive qualitative exercise in safeguarding practice, it can be, if available, supported by risk-based consensus, actuarial and structured assessments, tools, and instruments to 'evidence' a threshold decision (De Bortoli et al., 2017). The use of assessments/tools/instruments offers front-line practitioners a way of describing a practical-moral situation in a technical-rational framework, however, their use is only as effective as the practitioner's knowledge on using it, e.g. vigilance for optimising assessment/tool/instrument conditions that maintains equity, validity and reliability (De Bortoli et al., 2017). The use, meanings, and consistency and, to be more precise, equity, validity, and reliability of vocabulary in assessments/tools/instruments for safeguarding practice is under-researched.