‘I don’t want my face on the front page of The Sun’: the ‘Baby P effect’ as a barrier to social worker discretion
Journal of Children's Services
ISSN: 1746-6660
Article publication date: 28 January 2022
Issue publication date: 17 March 2022
Abstract
Purpose
The backdrop to the Munro Review of Child Protection was a narrative propagated in the British national press, and perpetuated particularly by the then opposition Conservative Party, that the case of “Baby P” evidenced the English child protection system was “failing” and in need of reform. Subsequently, the review asserted that the system had become “over-bureaucratised” and “defensive” at the expense of social worker discretion in the interests of the individual child, highlighting the need for “radical reform”. This paper aims to report on the extent of, and continued barriers to, social worker discretion within the contemporary English child protection.
Design/methodology/approach
As an ethnographic case study of a single English child protection team, the study used a sequential and iterative mixed method design, encompassing observation, document analysis, focus groups, questionnaire, interviews and “Critical Realist Grounded Theory”.
Findings
The study found that social worker discretion was continuing to be undermined by the “Baby P effect”; not only in the sense of increasing numbers of children within the system but also by the perpetual fear of being “named”, “blamed” and “shamed”, akin to Peter Connelly’s social workers.
Originality/value
The paper considers how discretion is manifested in contemporary child protection, especially in the context of the “child-centred” system envisaged by the Munro Review. It concludes that the British media and politicians have a continued role to play in reducing the risk associated with the social worker’s discretionary space.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the social workers who kindly agreed to participate in this study, and the local authority who helped facilitate it.
Ethical approval: This study received ethical approval from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Academic Ethics Committee in November 2014. All participants provided formal written consent to participate in this study.
Citation
Murphy, C. (2022), "‘I don’t want my face on the front page of The Sun’: the ‘Baby P effect’ as a barrier to social worker discretion", Journal of Children's Services, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 45-58. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCS-03-2021-0013
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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