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The purpose of this paper is to explore how children have been involved in research activities in recent international child protection research and what kinds of ethical and methodological decisions are made by researchers regarding children’s participation.

In the paper, the complexity of children’s participation in research activities is analysed through an integrative literature review.

Children’s right to self-determination and the right to make informed decisions were the most challenging ethical principles to implement in practice. The study shows that researchers usually decide on the research design, and child welfare professionals and parents assess the eligibility of the children as research subjects.

More ethical reflection and critical discussion on the rights that adults, both parents and professionals, have in deciding the involvement of children in research activities is required.

This article explores the neglected issue of the overrepresentation in the child protection system of children from ethnic, cultural, religious, racial, and linguistic minorities. It focuses on the accommodation of children’s diverse backgrounds within the s 31(2) threshold and s1 “best interests” stages of intervention under the Children Act 1989. First, it introduces the ethnic child protection penalty as a new tool for capturing the complex nature of overrepresentation of these children. Second, it proposes a framework for understanding the judicial approach in higher court decisions on the current extent and nature of accommodation. Third, it employs the penalty concept to help explain why case law analysis reveals difficulties with the current factor-based approach, whereas empirical research suggests generally satisfactory accommodation in practice. It concludes by proposing a contextualized framework for decision-making in relation to child protection.

Both research and child protection practice are still far away from having uniform definitions of violence against children. The different disciplines involved in the sectors of national child protection systems rely on separate discourses and terms; definitions are sometimes rather general or implicit, and operationalizations of important elements are rare. The various terms in use – child maltreatment, child abuse and neglect, child endangerment, children at risk, children in need, etc. – speak of the variety, not only of concepts, but also of practices. With respect to the latter, definitional issues are also issues of the scope and thresholds of intervention. This chapter provides an overview of major terms and definitional approaches to violence against children and identifies eminent differences between them. Findings from several studies on the Swiss child protection system, including the first multi-sectorial national survey on agency responses to child maltreatment, illustrate how professionals use definitions and the consequences of having multiple definitional concepts for documenting reported cases. We conclude by advocating for a consensus-based interdisciplinary process of developing shared definitions of violence against children.

From an ethical point of view, the inclusion of children and young people in research is problematic due to their inability to give informed consent and meaningfully express their views. The ethical aspects of research are multiplied if the research participant might have experienced child abuse, neglect, exploitation, or other forms of violence or assisted in such acts. Talking about victimization might be difficult and generate a sense of betrayal of attachment figures. On the other hand, the usual ethical procedure of asking parents or other caretakers to give consent for their children to discuss issues of maltreatment gives them the power to act as gatekeepers to stop children from participating in research. Therefore, researchers should contemplate if parental consent should be waived and how research can be developed to mobilise children's agency and ensure their meaningful cooperation in researching different aspects of violence that affect them. This chapter presents and critically analyses different research examples and discusses their ethical dimensions from a children's rights perspective. The research questions start with discussing the utility of consulting children in research on maltreatment; the gatekeeping role of caregivers; the distress and harm eventually caused to children and young people by participation in research and the benefits of participation for children. The survey examples discussed lead to the conclusions that research on maltreatment might sometimes cause distress; caregivers' power to refuse consent for their children's participation in research on maltreatment can alter epidemiologic data and impede children's right to express their opinion on issues that are central to their lives and therefore, it should be waived; consulting children is essential for collecting data on and improving responses to child maltreatment; and children's contribution to research on maltreatment depends on the adopted methodologies of the research, more advanced forms of participation, and training children to express their opinions, thus enriching scientific knowledge and promoting change.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the opportunities of geographical child protection assessment methods for adolescents victimised in extra-familial contexts.

Presenting empirical evidence from an action research study within one child protection service in the UK, the study draws upon qualitative data from practice observations, case review, training and five context assessments.

Safety mapping and neighbourhood observations provide options to assess extra-familial contexts. Findings reveal that these methods support practitioners to build local knowledge of areas supporting interventions into community places rooted in principles of child protection.

While geographical methods are already used by the police to map the locations of crimes, these methods provide opportunities to account for young people’s own experiences of harm and support interventions into neighbourhood spaces supporting a contextual safeguarding approach to adolescent harm.

The paper highlights the need for further testing of contextual safeguarding approaches and policy guidance that outlines whose role it is to protect children in communities.

Geographical assessment methods provide a route to engage with young people’s lived experience of place. And develop interventions that target contexts and not just individuals affected by extra-familial harm.

The paper presents original research into the use of geographical assessment methods to be used within a child protection framework.

The study covers two different forms of financial support for households, income support for single parents and reimbursements for depression medicines, and explores their relationships with the demand for child protection services.

The data were retrieved from the Sotkanet, the Finnish Indicator Bank, and included 292 Finnish municipalities. It was hypothesised that the effect of income support for single-parent households on the need for child protection is mediated by reimbursements for depression medicines. The hypotheses were tested by using a conditional process analysis program, PROCESS (Model 4).

It was found that income support reduces the proportion of reimbursements for depression medicines in a municipality, which in turn reduces the need for child protection services. At the level of social policy, the study tentatively suggests that the social welfare system may affect the demand for child protection by investing in income support for single-parent households.

The choice of variables does not fully explain the effect of the mechanism. The relationships that are found in this study can have hidden factors which affect them. Further, the data have only 292 cases, which is quite a small sample, and is limited to Finland.

The study suggests that the social welfare system may affect the demand for child protection by investing in income support for single-parent households.

How might the profession of child protection social work be “future proofed”, i.e. remain intact and of value beyond its present existence? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This is a discussion/“think piece” paper, in which the author argues that foregrounding the art and science of helping relationships is a way forward. Recognising and promoting the centrality of helping relationships is the direction in which the author believes (or is it hopes?) social work should head, because “more of the same” is not, in the author’s view, possible to sustain for much longer. Treading the well-worn but pot-holed path of box-ticking, endless risk assessment and perfunctory statutory visiting is likely to lead to continuing problems retaining social workers and, for those who do stay, increased burnout, compassion fatigue and secondary trauma, each of which interrupts or delays the development of working alliances with family members.

Growing reliance on thresholds and checklists to assess risk has served to increase referrals. As a result, social workers spend much of their time on triaging and filtering rather than working with the children and families that most need help and protection. Further, it is not what is in the practitioner’s toolkit that matters: rather, it is a defined set of personal skills and qualities that tips the balance to achieve lasting change. Thus, in order to “future proof” social work, we would do well to deepen our understanding of how helping relationships can lead to lasting change. Supporting social workers in this work is not just the responsibility of individual practitioners and their professional bodies, action also needs to be taken at governmental and managerial levels.

This is a discussion/“think piece”.

Since the reforms started in the Romanian child protection, and in spite of adopting children’s rights, and investing in the professionalization of the child protection staff, research has indicated that children continue to suffer violence in care settings.

This chapter contributes to the literature that documents children’s rights violations in Romanian residential care, before and after the political shift in 1989, including the period after the accession to the EU, by presenting and discussing interview data of 48 adults who spent parts of their childhoods in child protection settings.

The conceptual framework of this analysis is based on the human rights perspective and the transitional justice. The main body of the article presents the testimonials of adults who grew up in institutional care in Romania, as collected in the framework of the SASCA project, funded by the European Union. ¹

The purpose of this paper is to consider possible implications of recent policy initiatives in schools and local government for child safeguarding practice in education settings in the state sector in England.

Recent policy changes to promote devolution of decision-making to school and local government level are analysed in the light of the literature on multi-agency working for the protection of children.

The paper highlights the complexity of the current context in which local arrangements for the safeguarding of children are operating. This includes efforts at integration of funding and structures, coupled with rapid changes in policy in both education and children’s social care and greater decision-making powers at local level. Together this makes it difficult to evaluate the current strengths of safeguarding arrangements between schools and other local agencies to help ensure that arrangements for the safeguarding of children in “independent” state schools are robust and effective.

Researchers and policy-makers need to consider the efficacy of safeguarding arrangements under new local government and integrated structures in England.

There is relatively little research addressing inter-organisational information exchange in relation to education professionals involved in safeguarding. This paper sets out some directions for inquiry, including specific priorities that may be useful to the research and practice communities in the context of integration.

The paper provides a summary of key policies and strategies that inform child protection in state school settings in England.