‘Our tariff will rise’: Risk, probabilities and child protection

Abstract

This article draws on an ethnographic research project that examined how New Zealand child protection social workers discussed decision making about reported risks for children. The study involved a combination of detailed interviews and observations of social work practice in social work offices from late 2002 to mid 2003. In this article, I show how the initial responses by social workers in statutory child protective services were filtered through everyday heuristics about risk as they reasoned with harm and danger probabilities. Social workers who participated in this study tended to treat risk as something that needed to be known early on in the case trajectory. By retaining a focus on what was known and recorded and, therefore, could be identified and used as the basis of interventions, social workers effectively excluded the possibility of a challenge from alternate views or positions about risk. Importantly, this approach to risk prevented social workers, their supervisors and colleagues from exploring the ways in which risk was constructed and used. Thus, they did not consider the extent to which social workers decisions, such as those to remove a child exposed families to other types of risk, to the potential harm of placing children in alternative or foster care.

Keywords:

• risk
• reification
• child protection
• probabilities
• social work

Notes

1. Ruwhiu (2001, p. 62) defines Pakeha as ‘white people of Western Eurocentric origin’ who identify with Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership principles.

2. Identified as having a pacific island heritage.