Abstract
This article sets out to trouble the psychologised and pathologising approach that has come to dominate child protection practice in Aotearoa-New Zealand and comparable societies. Within a neoliberal ideological frame, Governments deny the need to adjust markets, except in ways that remove protections from workers or specific vulnerable groups. In this context, social work is concerned with adjusting people to the discipline of the market. Within a risk-focused child protection paradigm, circumstances and behaviours associated with material deprivation are construed as indicators of heightened danger and harm to children as opposed to a means of better understanding family life. It is argued here that appreciation of how social inequality plays out in the lives of children and their families is critical to the development of more effective child protection social work. Poverty exacerbates the everyday struggle of parenting—it shames and disempowers, reducing confidence and perceptions of competence. With reference to contemporary Aotearoa-New Zealand, this article critiques current developments in child protection social work and outlines a new direction for development.
Highlights
This article sets out to trouble the psychologised and pathologising approach that has come to dominate child protection practice in Aotearoa-New Zealand and comparable societies
Our aim is to identify some of the elements necessary for the design of a new practice vision which takes adequate account of the politically and economically situated nature of child protection social work
It is suggested that parallels, and differences, between these settings— in terms of efforts to address the over-representation of indigenous Māori children in all phases of child protection practice—may provide insights relevant to practice development in the wider Anglophone world
Summary
This article begins from the position that social work practice is politically located: that the mandate and methodology of social work is ideologically contested. Our aim is to identify some of the elements necessary for the design of a new practice vision which takes adequate account of the politically and economically situated nature of child protection social work. It is common to state the intentions of social work as helping people to accommodate to the status quo and as challenging the status quo by trying to bring about social change. It will be suggested here that this conflicted orientation is relevant to an understanding of the challenges which confront contemporary child protection social work; a field that has become increasingly central to the identity of the profession (Bywaters et al 2016a; Parton 2014a). The first step in this process requires a critical deconstruction of the contemporary relationship between social work, child protection and the neoliberal political project (Hyslop 2016)
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