Safeguarding
Support and services have been withdrawn from families at the same time as intrusive and coercive intervention has been stepped up. Children and their families are suffering considerable harm as a result.
“Social work in child protection is no longer part of the solution to cruelty to children – it has become part of the problem.”
“There has been a steady increase in the numbers of families experiencing investigations for suspected abuse in the last decades, the majority of which do not appear to uncover actual abuse and do not result in help being offered to families.”
Greig Ferguson, Professors Brid Featherstone and Kate Morris
Critical and Radical Social Work: Framed to fit? Challenging the domestic abuse ‘story’ in child protection (2020)
Vanishing rights
Social work involves some of the most intrusive actions it is possible for the State to take and children and their families’ human rights are critical to protecting the most vulnerable. Yet ten years ago the government cut all mention of human rights from the governmental guidance. Without this framework both social work and wider safeguarding practices have become increasingly intrusive and harmful.
Children and families are being hurt by a system which should be there to protect.
“Indeed ‘human rights’ gets not a single mention. Not one. Human rights have been airbrushed out.”
Govt guidance: the erasure of
consent and rights from practice
The relationship between
state and family
has been rewritten
“When life falls apart, when your nightmares come true, when everything that you value is put at risk – you will find yourself facing systems and bureaucracies which you have never before encountered.”
Taliah Drayak, activist
PFAN: Letter of thanks to advocate
Punishing state
The state in the UK is both neglectful and intrusive and becoming ever more so. Families are blamed for their failure to cope in the difficult situations in which they have been placed.
Real problems of poverty in the face of escalating costs of basics, reduced access to support and services and increased pressures is repeatedly framed as poor parenting.
“Austerity measures have made people poorer, reduced community facilities and networks, and decimated the safety net and support available. At the same time there has been an increase of social services have increased the policing of those in need and coercive intervention into families.”
Professors Brid Featherstone, Anna Gupta, Kate Morris and Sue White
The British Journal of Social Work: Protecting Children: Towards a Social Model (2018)
A punishing system: individuals
blamed for societal failure
Rising numbers of
intrusive investigations
Part of this intrusion, and focus on struggling individuals instead of the failures of government to provide what is needed, has been to insist that authorities need to know everything about children, their families and their lives.
Over the years what is included within ‘safeguarding’ has continuously expanded as has the levels of information about children being shared. Now not only is there a significant body of evidence as to the harm to children and their families – as warned there would be by civil liberties campaigners – but there’s also a shocking lack of any evidence that it actually helps children. Yet despite all of this the government now wants to go much much further in accessing and using children’s information and claiming it as wellbeing.
Sharing isn’t safety: the attacks on children and families privacy
Child removal
Removal of children from families is a drastic and damaging measure and must be a last resort. Instead, the consequence of our neglectful and punitive system is families being separated not supported. There is widespread concern that children are being removed when it shouldn’t be necessary.
“The impact of background economic conditions and the associated pressure on family situations may suggest that there is likely to be continued volume growth ahead.”
Rising numbers separated: government support
for removing children plus big profits
Rights in the
‘care’ system
Adoption focus
ignoring rights
Rights protect children
All of this ever increasing State monitoring and intrusion has not made things better for children.
Children need help for their families, so that their families are able to care for them. This is what human rights frameworks – which the government have agreed to – say must be provided. And this support must be provided without trampling their rights to privacy, to protection of personal information and to family.
Rights for children must be at the heart of how we keep children safe.