The complexities of caring for child protection workers: the contexts of practice and supervision

Abstract

This paper focuses on the challenges and complexities of caring for front-line child protection workers. It is organised in four main sections. After a brief explanation of the background, the paper reviews the silencing of children as a form of defensive denial. The second section presents research on the problems faced by child protection workers and the defences used in response to actual and threatened violence. The third section reflects on the resulting complexities of supervision in the face of organisational defensiveness. In the final section, examples of good staff support from outside social work are summarised. The paper draws on theoretical material and the primary author's experiences of undertaking research in a range of organisations.

Keywords:

• child abuse
• child protection workers
• societal, worker and organisational defensiveness
• supervision

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr Janet Stanley, Dr Neerosh Mudaly and Dr Bernadette Saunders for their work which contributed to this article. They would also like to thank the reviewers who provided valuable feedback on earlier drafts. We would like to express our gratitude to the police forces for sharing their ideas, successes and failures, and facilitating our research.

This paper is based on a lecture given at a conference convened by the British Association of Social Workers in London in 2010.

Child Abuse Prevention Research Australia is a joint initiative between the Australian Childhood Foundation and Monash Injury Research Institute, Monash University.