Inside the lion's den: the risks to experts entering into child protection court proceedings

Abstract

This article explores how social defences can be applied to the child protection legal process, and how and why this legal process can be disturbed by uncontained anxiety resulting in professional conflict. Such organisational conflict results in a preoccupation with adult conflicts that uncannily mirror domestic violence dynamics between warring parents, and as a consequence, neglect or even a re-traumatising of the child within the child protection legal proceedings. There is an exploration of the psycho-social dynamics that can lead to both expert and expert evidence becoming contaminated in the organisational culture in operation during such proceedings and how experts risk being exploited in the ensuing battle between professionals that takes the whole process away from the primary task, which is the welfare of the child. This article concludes that institutions and discourses organise subjects including experts and that there is more in operation than unconscious phenomena. As such, there is a need for experts to hold firmly in mind the organisational and institutional contexts in which they are working. The institutions are extremely powerful and require personal management in order for experts to recognise how they and their input risk being reconstructed anew during the process. Throughout this article the identities of the family and professionals have been carefully disguised and ethics approval was granted from a recognised ethics committee.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• child abuse
• court
• social construction
• professional conflict
• experts

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to Georgia Lepper for her input into the final draft of this article.