Counting family support

Preventative family support approaches are positioned as central to child welfare policy reforms aiming to address the problems of relying upon investigation and out‐of‐home care as the main modes of intervention. Extensive claims are made for family support but relatively little is known about its scope, processes and impact. This study examines the provision of family support in one jurisdiction. A census‐type survey of family support services in one Australian state was conducted using a performance measurement framework in which inputs, outputs, processes and outcomes were measured. Family support services constituted a minor part of child welfare expenditure. They provided a narrow range of service types, and most families received short duration, low intensity services. Workers had difficulty identifying the specific child and family needs that were met by services. For family support to be a genuinely alternative response to concerns about the care of children, it must be capable of making an observable difference in the lives of families experiencing serious difficulties. The collection of aggregate performance data on family support would assist in understanding the nature and outcomes of service provision, as well as ensure family support is ‘counted’ in measurement‐orientated policy and budget processes.     

Child protection and family support practice in Ireland: a contribution to present debates from a historical perspective

This paper takes the opportunity of the current child welfare system change in Ireland to promote the value of learning from history to better understand the interface between family support and child protection. The paper draws from the histories of child protection and family support to illuminate the commonalities and differences that have come to define the two practices. Using findings from two historical studies – one on family support and the other on child protection – the paper demonstrates the unique features and the many integrated elements of family support and child protection in Ireland. It is argued that students and practitioners need to be provided with a stronger sense of the historical developments that have shaped the present. This will enable comprehension of the complex context within which current relations between ‘protection’ and ‘support’ are negotiated and help to avoid operating in a vacuum of a present only viewpoint. The paper concludes with reference to the need for students and practitioners to navigate the complex relationship between family support and child protection at practice, policy and organizational level through a well‐informed knowledge of the historical as well as the present context.     

Family support services buffer the effect of child welfare notifications on child removals

Previous studies have found mixed results about the effects of family support services within the child protection system. The purpose of the study is to examine whether family support services are associated with the need for child removals at the community level. The material of the study consists of Finnish municipalities (N = 292) and their child protection indicators. Linear regression analysis was conducted to analyse the associations between the dependent variable (child removals) and the main predictors (child welfare notifications and family support services). It was found that family support services are associated with child removals. The more children there are in family support services, the more there are also child removals in a municipality. The key finding of the analysis is that a higher rather than lower proportion of clients in family support services buffers the increased effect of demand (child welfare notifications) on child removals better. In this sense, the demand for child removals is not only associated with the characteristics of children and families but may be partly explained by the role of family support services in a municipality. The present study underlines the significance of a system-level approach to child protection.     

Service user participation in diverse child protection contexts: principles for practice

Promoting the participation of children and parents in child protection practice is one of the most complex and sensitive areas of social work practice. Increasingly, child protection legislation and policy in many parts of the world enshrines ideals of service user participation. Yet, with the exception of extensive discussion about family group conferencing, the principles and methods for achieving participatory practices in child protection work remain underdeveloped. We use the term 'child protection' to refer to a broad spectrum of child and family welfare services aimed at prevention of (or intervention to address) child abuse and neglect. This spectrum of services includes intensive family support, family support, domestic violence, statutory child protection and child and family advocacy services. In this paper, we present findings from the first phase of a 3-year study into participatory practice in child protection. In this paper, we present findings from a qualitative analysis of interviews with 28 child protection practitioners across five domains of child protection work. Our analysis reveals three core principles of participatory practice underpinning these practitioners' accounts as well as contextual differences among them. We conclude with a discussion of the educational implications of our findings.     

A comparison of state support for young people leaving care in Norway and Sweden: Differences within comparable welfare systems

The aim of this article is to account for and discuss support to young care leavers within the comparable welfare regimes of Norway and Sweden and to explore key differences between these 2 countries. This model implies that children and young people are included and entitled to support through being family members, not as independent actors in their own right. This makes young care leaver's transition from care to adulthood problematic—as they often do not have access to family support, they may be positioned in a vacuum where they are clients neither entitled to support from the child welfare system nor supported by their families of origin. In Norway, legislators and policymakers have agreed that care leavers need particular attention and targeted support, whereas in Sweden, there has been no such agreement. However, the Norwegian system of giving leaving care services is not strong enough to provide transition support to all care leavers, even if the legislation gives stronger protection than in Sweden. The article discusses the need for targeted measures of support for a successful care‐leaving process.     

What parents value from formal support services in the context of identified child abuse

Parents whose children are identified as having experienced or being at risk of experiencing significant harm potentially provide an invaluable dimension to our understanding of the circumstances that result in child abuse or neglect and how best to respond to these invariably complex situations. This paper reports findings from a study of the experiences of six parents.
In-depth interviews were conducted with four mothers and two fathers who had been referred to an intensive family support service by the Queensland statutory child protection authority. Using a critical ecological perspective, the study focused on identifying and understanding the experiences of the parents in using formal family support services, including aspects of service delivery that were helpful or unhelpful. Parents also commented on their experiences of statutory child protection services.
Service components and worker qualities that parents identified as being helpful included being accessible, targeted and integrated and being able to meet a continuum of needs, from a micro to a broader level. Their reports provide invaluable insight into how formal family support services, including child protection services, can better meet the needs of parents in addressing the recurring problem of child maltreatment.     

What do service users think of evaluation? Evidence from family support

Programme evaluators increasingly strive to capture how service users experience child and family welfare programmes. Yet user involvement is rare in a more routine form of evaluation: performance measurement. This paper considers how service users' perspectives can help improve the performance indicators that inform child and family service funding, management and planning. Qualitative research, conducted in family support contexts in New South Wales, Australia, identifies five user‐defined domains upon which indicators can be based. As well as showing how parents judge service quality and outcomes, the findings also show how they experience data collection, and how they prefer to participate in the routine performance measurement and monitoring that informs child and family welfare provision.     

A tangled web: parental contact with children in kinship care

Contact between parents and children in care is a contested area. Parental contact is recognized to be important, yet may present protective issues; in the kinship care environment, it brings the particular challenges of complex family relationships. Seeking the parents' perspective in a child protection context is difficult and therefore under‐researched. This paper describes a nested study within an Australian research project on family contact in kinship care in which the perspectives of 18 mothers and 2 fathers were sought via in‐depth interviews. Mothers and fathers described strong feelings of disempowerment in the context both of their family and the child protection system. The relationship between parent and caregiver emerged as a significant issue. All of the parents wished to remain in contact with their children in a meaningful way, whether or not they were likely to resume their children's care; however, contact arrangements presented many difficulties for them. Mothers articulated the need for services that are more empowering and respectful, rather than oriented towards them as failed parents. In order to build appropriate models of support and intervention, we argue for a more inclusive conceptual frame for family life that gives greater recognition to the role of non‐custodial parents in the lives of their children.     

Preliminary support for the use of narrative exposure therapy in a child protection context: Collective case-study narratives

The present paper attempts to provide preliminary support for the use of narrative exposure therapy (NET) in a child protection context. The prevalence of violence, abuse and neglect (VAN) within New South Wales is outlined as well as the current perspectives in trauma definition and symptomology, and the prevalence of trauma symptomology among birthparents and young people within child protection services. NET is introduced including its theoretical background, methodology, applications and research. Four applications of NET within a child protection context are presented, including lifelines and narrative excerpts. Specific themes presented included experiences of physical abuse, domestic and family violence, parental drug use, suicidal ideation and child removal. Statistical analysis including reliable change, clinical and statistical significance of pre- and post-PCL-5 outcomes measures are presented to infer preliminary support for NET within a child protection context. Limitations and future considerations for future research are discussed.     

Promoting child protection, welfare and healing: the case for developing best practice

This paper presents a 'best practice perspective' on child and family work. This involves moving beyond the 'deficit perspective' which dominates how the literature examines practice negatively in terms of what is not being done well to one which sets out best practice positively as a model for learning and developing systems and practice competencies. The paper focuses specifically on the meanings and development of best practice in family support in the context of child protection work. This involves work that is not only sensitive to achieving child protection and empowering practice in the context of power differences, but which meets the challenges of engaging therapeutically with and ultimately helping (often resistant) service users. The paper argues that issues of trauma and healing, and self-actualization more broadly, need to move to the centre of how family support and child protection are theorized and done. The aim should be to promote child protec-tion, welfare and healing through the development of egalitarian relationships in what Giddens calls the 'democratic family'.     

Protective support and supportive protection for families “in the middle”: Learning from the Irish context

This paper critically examines the relationship between statutory family support and child protection using the case study of Ireland. It builds on the work of Devaney and McGregor (2017) to offer an additional contribution to existing frameworks for practice through adapting the Hardiker Exton and Barker (1991) model of prevention. Using evidence from current Irish developments, the case for moving away from linear and simplistic differentiation of family support and child protection is made. Evidence from three main sources in Ireland is presented to develop the argument. This evidence includes the Child Care Law Reporting project (Coulter, 2015, 2018); a recent evaluation of a family support practice model called Meitheal (Rodriguez Cassidy and Devaney, 2018) and recent findings about public awareness of family support (McGregor and NicGabhainn, 2018). We argue that special attention should be paid to families “in the middle” who are in need of both support and protection and propose an adapted version of Hardiker et al. model to aid in this work. We identify what should happen at different levels for macrostructural to micropractice levels. We conclude that the learning from the Irish case study can be applied to an international context.     

South Asian immigrants' experience of child protection services: are we recognizing strengths and resilience?

Ethno‐racial minority families who come in contact with child protection services face unique challenges that include different ideas about appropriate child rearing practices, possibly different definitions of child maltreatment, the possibility of racial biases and service provision that does not address their particular needs. Ethno‐racial minority immigrants encounter additional barriers to services associated with the challenges of settlement in a new cultural environment. Although considerable research has explored these issues, knowledge of the experiences of ethno‐racial families who have been in contact with child protection is limited. The current paper provides insights from a qualitative study that explored the experiences of one ethno‐racial group (South Asians) in Canada. Findings suggest a variety of reasons that families come into contact with the child protection system, and the characteristics of the sample highlight their difficult financial and employment circumstances. Themes include participants' desire to be better informed about the reasons for child protection involvement and about what they can expect from the worker and the agency. They also identified a wish for services that not only recognize their cultural diversity but also respond to the needs of the whole family. In‐home services were especially appreciated. The findings reveal the resilience and personal agency among participants that can be enhanced through strength‐based approaches to practice. Helping others, establishing community networks and developing needed services were avenues of resilience identified.     

Synergies and tensions in child protection and parent support: policy lines and practitioners cultures1

Social workers' interventions in support of children and their families have often proved a minefield of sort, filled up with conflicting demands, expectations and tasks. This paper sets the resulting debate in the context of both social policy orientations and social work cultures. It argues that partnerships between families and practitioners have to be understood as the result of a complex set of factors. Data from a qualitative study of social work professional cultures suggest that among practitioners, policy orientations intertwine with different styles of conceiving social work; accordingly, professional cultures play an important part in connecting, or failing to connect, child protection and family support.     

A comparison of systems and outcomes for safeguarding children in Australia and Norway

Using aggregated national data, this paper compares outcomes of Australian ‘child protection’ (CP) and Norwegian ‘child welfare services’ (CWS). We highlight each nation's context and key elements of their CP/CWS organizations, with emphasis on policy and programme orientation. System outcomes are examined along with the implications of their different approaches. The main policy focus in Australia is protection and risk, while Norway's systemic approach stresses prevention, early intervention and support. These differences influence practitioner's intervention strategies and how the needs of children and parents are met. In Norway, approximately 80% of the children in the CWS receive some sort of supportive services. In contrast, Australian services for supporting families are narrowly targeted. Both countries share the ‘best interest of the child’ principle and an increased focus on children's rights, and have experienced increased service demands and rates of children in out‐of‐home care. The paper explores the relative merits of these systems.     

After Safety,What is the Goal of Child Welfare Services: Permanency,Family Continuity or Social Benefit?

Child welfare services have multiple goals, including child protection, family continuity, and achievement of legal permanency so children can end their involvement with child welfare services and have a lifetime family. These goals are not all achievable to the same extent in all cases. American child welfare policy has, in the last few years, become more definitive about the priority of child protection above family preservation. Now, situations which involve safety risks that are too great do not require any efforts at reunifying children to their biological homes. Less clear in American child welfare policy and practice is the value to be placed on other factors – particularly when a child cannot return home and will need an alternative adoptive family. Practitioners often emphasize family continuity – that is, the opportunity to maintain contact with the biological parent and extended family members – as a key decision making consideration. Yet, family continuity does not necessarily predict a successful transition to adulthood that is healthy for children or provides social benefits to the community. This paper explores the rationale for expanding child welfare decision making criteria by adding longer-term outcomes and the likelihood that children will eventually generate social benefits.     

Local authority family centre intervention: a statistical exploration of services as family support or family control

This paper sets out findings from a statistical exploration into services arising from child protection referrals which became open cases allocated to local authority child care social workers employed by a large local authority social services department in South Wales. The workers operate from six local authority family centres located in areas of high social need. They offer a range of family support services as well as carrying out child protection investigations and related activities. In analysing the data a probability ratio was created to identify which offered services were more likely to be taken up. An activity index for services offered and taken up was then constructed followed by an attempt to delineate families' likely orientation to a family support or 'protection and control' mode of intervention. This is achieved by creating a simple range of lower and upper bounds of perception by imputing service orientation from the position of three 'representative individuals': a 'very suspicious client', a 'neutral third party', and a 'very optimistic social worker'. These three positions allow manipulation of the questionnaire data to estimate the probable interpretation of services from provider and recipient standpoints. From these sources parameter estimates to explore key variables associated with worker views about the sufficiency of their service in relation to family support and/or more controlling forms of intervention are deployed. The study suggests that child protection cases receive a family centre service strongly orientated to support rather than a narrow policing activity. However, there remain some notable differences of perception between worker and 'representative individuals' that imply potential difficulties over the role of local authority family centres.     

Understanding family support provision within the context of prevention: a critical analysis of a local voluntary sector project

This paper presents a model of service process for a family support service at the preventative level as part of a wider debate about child welfare systems in the UK and beyond. The paper places the debate about the shape of preventative family support services within the policy context and uses it to critique various models of service provision, principally the ‘child rescue’ paradigm. From this, the paper explores the characteristics that constitute a complex, yet preventative, family support service. This model is then illustrated using empirical evidence collected from the evaluation of a voluntary and community sector project in the North West of England that describes the service process and some of its characteristics. The paper argues that the model of family support presented has implications for the type of service process that can effectively put the theory into practice. Finally, questions for further research are defined in relation to the implications that this model poses for professional–user relationships and for the professional forms that can deliver preventative family support.     

The Influence of Performance Measurement on Child Welfare Policy and Practice

Correspondence to Clare Tilbury, School of Social Work and Applied Human Sciences, University of Queensland Q 4072, Australia. E-mail: c.tilbury{at}social.uq.edu.au Summary The increasing use of performance measurement in child welfarepromises to have significant consequences. Performance indicatorsare not neutral or merely technical—they represent viewpointsand values that may influence policy and practice. This three-partarticle examines how this may occur. The first part outlinesa theoretical approach to understanding the policy significanceof performance indicators. As they become part of the frameworkwithin which policy debates occur, indicators may frame policyissues, create boundaries around options for solutions, definestandards for evaluating results, and set the terms of publicdiscourse. The second part discusses the background to the developmentof performance measurement in child welfare in Britain, theUSA and Australia, locating it as integral to contemporary approachesto public sector management. The third part examines the performanceindicators used in these jurisdictions-aspects of performancemeasured, underlying assumptions about ‘good’ performance,and how they construct child welfare. Existing indicators narrowlyconstruct child welfare in terms of investigations and out-of-homecare, whereas the child welfare literature suggests a broaderapproach with more attention to family support. The articleargues that there is space to negotiate on the new managerialistterrain, developing an approach to performance measurement thatcontributes to better services and outcomes for children andfamilies.     

Strategies for survival: users' experience of child welfare in three welfare regimes

This paper draws on research into child welfare services in France, Germany and England which compares the subjective experience of mothers who have been in contact with family support and child protection agencies in the three countries. The mothers' stories suggest that successful help‐achieving strategies differ according to the nature of the child welfare regime, and that behaviour which is effective in getting a good response in one country may work less well elsewhere. The stories of two mothers in each of the countries have been chosen to demonstrate how the structures of different social welfare regimes affect the efforts of welfare users to get the help they need.     

Family support: past, present and future challenges

Section 17 of the 1989 Children Act incorporates a new legal framework for the delivery of services to support children in their own homes, and is a crucial part of the act, both in its own right, and in terms of its significance for other aspects of child care such as child protection activity. However, while "children in need" represents a new legal phraseology, the policy and professional issues addressed by the clause have a long history. This paper traces the evolution of the current approach to family support, and provides a brief account of its impact on policy and practice.