International social work has many manifestations. These reflect the diversity of contexts and roles in which social workers practice. The profession, whether on the frontline, in the classroom, within the page or among policy dialogue is increasingly aware of a responsibility to ensure that a multiplicity of actors are given voice and lend their perspective to informing what it does. Within this picture, and sometimes all too often, the perception of a social worker remains as someone who is primarily involved in the protection of children. This edition of the journal seeks to fuse these two considerations. In doing so it brings together a set of different voices on the child protection process: children, women, practitioners, students and supervisors. Taken together we have four qualitative articles that provide a rich spectrum take on this most common of social work subjects. It further supports the journal’s own direction of travel of seeking more articles led and written by authors from a diversity of practice backgrounds, as well as from any academic orientation. We have, for example, recently published articles for example from Australia, China, Czech Republic and Northern Ireland, many of these exploring the global complexities of international social work.
Our exploration in this issue begins with Katelynn Buchner, Tammy Pearson and Susan Burke’s rich qualitative exploration of five Canadian Indigenous women’s voices regarding their experience of contact with child welfare services at the birth of their child. The authors, led by a thesis student turned practicing social worker, had the explicit aim in their research of providing Indigenous mothers with the opportunity to voice their experiences. As a consequence, the article provides a myriad of challenging messages from the women to the profession. These include experiences of a range of very powerful emotions and many threads of feeling judged and stigmatised within a structurally oppressive system of huge power imbalances. What comes across very strongly is their capacity to be caring mothers despite the challenges of many prior and current socio-economic experiences. The article concludes with a set of direct considerations for how social workers can improve their responses to women like those in the study, including making more effort in the engagement process, working within very explicit agreements and social workers questioning their own potential for bias and racism.
Our second article, takes key messages from a rich mixed methods phenomenological study, including the direct voices of four children who have experienced the child protection conference process. In exploring the children’s voices in these mass meetings of many professionals, Justine Ogle and Sharon Vincent integrate interviews with the children along with the recorded accounts of the meetings and the views of the chair of the meeting and participating social workers. The authors set out to clearly establish and portray the voice of the children within what is often a life course determining process. What they established was a contribution to the increasing body of knowledge that suggests despite a rhetoric of inclusivity and partnership approaches (co-production and what matters conversations) any sense of ‘child centred practice, as exhorted in legal, policy and organisational child protection discourses is not realised as meaningful participation for the majority of children who are the subject of child protection conferences and child protection plans’.
Often at the core of these plans, and widely adopted internationally, is the use of the Signs of Safety approach. In our third article Caroline White, Jo Bell and Lisa Revell utilise interviews and focus groups with qualifying social work students to hear their perspectives and understanding of the approach following receipt of a bespoke training on this particular practice method. The data extracts illustrate how the students received the initial training and then how well the use of Signs of Safety was utilised by students in their placement learning opportunities. The article highlights that whilst the students embraced the approach it was not without challenges for them. These challenges included feeling they were questioning if they had intervened appropriately in issues of complex practice, and also the realisations that identifying strengths within families did not always prevent families moving into more formal stages of the child protection process. The researchers’ analysis of the students’ perceptions suggest there is a paradox of simplicity within Signs of Safety that requires practitioners to be supported in developing clear communication skills, both verbal and written.
Social workers who regularly work with practice that makes complex practical demands on their emotions, resources and skills often take the arising professional dilemma into the supervision process. In another article led by a practicing social worker, Charlotte Pitt, Samia Addis and David Wilkins analyse interviews from social workers and their supervisors engaged in child protection practice. They identify five key messages about how the social work supervision process contributes to social workers managing many of the issues raised in the three preceding articles. The social worker and supervisor voices suggest that supervision supports: a sense of accountability, exploring worker emotions, and the provision of alternative perspectives. However, the often-immediate nature of child protection decision making also requires supervisor availability outside of the formal diarised space. Critically, the authors established that the social workers often found a lack of time and space afforded to the valuable process of reflection and the arriving at considered judgements. Pitt et al. conclude by trying to compare their own emerging framework for supervision with that by the late Tony Morrison which is so often popularly adopted.
Four articles can only offer a limited snapshot of the diversity within social work practice, and the voices of all those with whom social workers practice. This issue of Practice nonetheless provides a rich spectrum of considerations across the sequences of child protection practice which should be of value to our readers.
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