Article
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Outing the Elephants: Exploring a New Paradigm for Child Protection Social Work
Version 1
: Received: 9 April 2018 / Approved: 10 April 2018 / Online: 10 April 2018 (08:21:26 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Hyslop, I.; Keddell, E. Outing the Elephants: Exploring a New Paradigm for Child Protection Social Work. Soc. Sci. 2018, 7, 105. Hyslop, I.; Keddell, E. Outing the Elephants: Exploring a New Paradigm for Child Protection Social Work. Soc. Sci. 2018, 7, 105.
Abstract
This article sets out to deconstruct and challenge the psychologised and pathologising approach that has come to dominate child protection practice in Aotearoa-New Zealand and comparable societies in neoliberal times. Within a risk and protection focused paradigm circumstances and behaviours associated with material deprivation are construed as indicators of heightened danger and harm as opposed to a means of better understanding family life. In this way, although poverty may be classified as an issue that is worthy of attention in the realm of broader economic and social policy, structural inequality is rendered largely irrelevant to the practice of statutory child protection. This article sets out to trouble this construction. It will be argued that understandings of how the effects of material inequality are played out in the lives of children and their families are critical to the development of more effective child protection social work. This ‘life-world’ is generally populated by young women parenting in poverty. Poverty exacerbates the everyday struggle of parenting - it shames and dis-empowers; reducing confidence and perceptions of competence (Gupta, 2015). A paradigm shift is needed. Child protection policy and practice needs to re-engage with the every-day struggles that accompany the lives of socially marginalised families in increasingly stratified late capitalist society. The future of social work in child protection depends on it.
Keywords
child protection; poverty; inequality; neoliberalism; new paradigm
Subject
Medicine and Pharmacology, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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