Record Details

Multi-agency child protection

Social Work and Social Sciences Review

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Field Value
 
Title Multi-agency child protection
 
Creator Stroud, Julia
Warren-Adamson, Chris
 
Subject inter-agency child protection;child abuse;risk assessment
 
Description Public concern over, and recent developments in, the field of child protection are well known (Munro 2012). Within these developments, there has been a strengthening of the role of social work with an increased focus on, and recognition of, professional knowledge, skills and ‘expert’ decision making (Munro 2011; Gilbert et al. 2011). Focus on inter-professional and multi-agency practice has developed alongside (Frost and Lloyd 2006; Frost and Robinson 2007; Ruch 2009), and continues to have a clear focus in the recently issued Working Together to Safeguard Children (H.M. Government 2013).This paper enquires into a relatively under-explored area of multi-agency child protection practice, specifically, that of the police (that is,. non-specialists in child protection) making an urgent, first response to a child protection call, often out of hours and without immediate recourse to the expertise and knowledge of child protection practitioners. In these situations, the police are called upon to make key decisions: for example, whether to immediately protect and remove children using police protection powers (Section 46(1) Children Act 1989), to refer on to local authority social services for a s47 investigation or s17 services, or to take no further action. There is exploration of the issues raised by a request from the police to develop an assessment framework as an aid to practice in these situations. The police had in mind an equivalent instrument to a domestic abuse framework already adopted by them. The paper reviews debates, particularly about predictive efficacy, in the construction of assessment and decision-making tools. The nature and distinction between consensus based and actuarial risk assessment instruments are examined, as are challenges for general multi-agency working, alongside the specific challenges for front line police officers. It is proposed that a consensus based assessment framework to support decision making, drawing on empirically tested, actuarially informed risk assessment evidence, which is collaboratively tested with a multi-agency group, is indicated.
 
Publisher Whiting & Birch Ltd
 
Date 2013-08-16
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article
 
Format application/pdf
text/html
 
Identifier https://journals.whitingbirch.net/index.php/SWSSR/article/view/536
10.1921/swssr.v16i3.536
 
Source Social Work and Social Sciences Review; Vol 16, No 3: Number 3 / 2013; 37-49
1746-6105
0953-5225
 
Language eng
 
Relation https://journals.whitingbirch.net/index.php/SWSSR/article/view/536/579
https://journals.whitingbirch.net/index.php/SWSSR/article/view/536/580
 
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