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This article is an extended version of an ‘experts’ briefing' commissioned to inform senior child welfare managers in English local authorities and voluntary agencies about the available evidence to inform the provision of effective services in complex child protection cases. It starts by noting how differences in the approach to service provision in different jurisdictions affect both the nature of research conducted and its transferability across national boundaries. It then summarises the characteristics both of parents who are likely to maltreat their children and also of the children most likely to be maltreated. The factors that make some families ‘hard to engage’ or ‘hard to help/change’ are then discussed, as are the essential elements of effective professional practice in child protection. Particular attention is paid to effective approaches to helping families and young people who are hard to identify or engage.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

Adverse childhood experiences that are consistently experienced over a sustained period of time throughout childhood result in an accumulation of childhood adversity, which is often referred to in the literature as cumulative harm. This paper aims to closely examine statutory child protection practice, which favours an episodic and incident-focused approach to assessing risk and harm, failing to account for the evaluation of the accumulation of adversity and harm, commonly experienced by children exposed to maltreatment. The paper defines an existing gap in practice frameworks to adequately identify and respond to the accumulation of adversity.

Drawing on practice experiences in Queensland Australia, the paper examines service delivery responses to cumulative harm in the context of the Intensive Family Support model of service delivery.

Within current frameworks for child protection service delivery, there is no method of assessing the diverse and cumulative effects of ongoing chronic child maltreatment and adversity, despite research confirming that cumulative harm very often co-occurs with other child protection concerns. To effectively and collaboratively intervene in matters of chronic and cumulative abuse and neglect, practitioners and stakeholders must be guided by frameworks and assessments that accurately recognise and acknowledge the impact of ongoing exposure to adverse experiences and maltreatment.

The need for a valid and reliable assessment method that draws together all elements contributing to the chronic maltreatment experience for a child and family: multiplicity, diversity and severity.

Practice solutions tailored to each child’s specific cumulative experiences of adversity and maltreatment will promote better social, emotional and health outcomes across the lifespan.

This paper highlights a significant gap in assessment and practice frameworks and advances the impetus for cumulative harm to be proactively integrated into social care and service delivery.

Summarizes the responsibilities that schools have to include child protection and prevention of abuse within the curriculum. Describes how the Department for Education is making £3 million available for training of one teacher in each school to handle issues of child abuse, and lists the roles of these teachers. Explains how any programme designed to prevent abuse must be suitable for all children, whether they have suffered abuse or not. Lists the six key concepts that underpin such educational programmes. Observes how failure to boost self‐esteem and encourage assertiveness skills will make children and young people more vulnerable to abuse. Describes cross‐curricular exercises and topic themes that make it possible to focus on the key concepts relevant to the prevention of child abuse.

Purpose – Young people exhibiting serious behavior problems represent an enormous challenge for municipal child welfare services in Norway. In working with these youngsters, it is vital to create opportunities for them to participate in the decisions affecting their lives. The study aims to explore the dilemmas involving issues of participation on the one side and protection on the other: it is one where the child welfare worker is being required, on the one hand, to provide youths with an opportunity to participate in decisions affecting them while at the same time being required to protect those youths in their care from harming themselves in various ways. These two concerns of participation and protection are spelled out specifically in Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Children of which Norway is a signatory.

Methodology – This study draws from a qualitative reanalysis of interview data from a 15-year longitudinal study of 85 child welfare clients in Norway. They were followed up at three points in time: first when they became clients (age 14–15), next when they were young adults (age 20), and finally when they were 30 years old. All of these 85 informants had initially come to the attention of child protection authorities owing to the severity of their behavior problems.

Findings – The chapter describes how these young people experienced both participation and protection of the child welfare services at the time they were provided and later on when they had become adults. One important finding of the study is that, as adults, their opinions had changed and they then believed that the protection usually in the form of guardianship earlier provided to them as youngsters had been beneficial to them.

Researchers have been known to complain that practitioners do not listen to their findings or recommendations, and have emphasised the importance of evidence-based practice. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, research concerning children produced a shift leading to a new sociological paradigm of childhood. This paradigm parallels the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), produced at the same time. Both productions emphasise common themes, which in the principles of the CRC are expressed as non-discrimination, children's participation and the best interests of the child. Sociological frameworks and the CRC were brought together in the growing movement to ‘child-rights programming’ (CRP) taken up by many UN and international children's agencies since the turn of the twenty-first century.¹

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

While studies on service users’ participation and their perceptions on the quality of services exist, agreement between family members’ and practitioners’ assessments of the family’s situation has received less interest. The purpose of this paper is to investigate agreement and its effect on outcomes by comparing the viewpoints of three groups of informants (children, mothers and practitioners) in the context of statutory child protection in two study groups – one applying a systemic approach (SPM) and a service-as-usual control group (SAU).

A quasi-experimental repeated-measures study design was applied. Outcome data comprised 112 cases (SPM cases n = 56 and SAU cases n = 56) at three sites. Data was collected from all participants at baseline and six months later.

First, practitioners’ analyses of a child’s need for protection did not meet family members’ expressed need for help. Second, child–mother agreement on the need for service intervention at T1 predicted a decrease in practitioner-assessed abuse or neglect from T1 to T2. In this sample, no differences were found between the two groups.

This study highlights the importance of making explicit the viewpoints of children, parents and practitioners in casework and research to improve understanding of how their perspectives differ over the course of the process and how possible initial disagreements affect outcomes.

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.

Whilst the government makes progress on opening up children’s social work, including child protection, to the market place and to private and commercial businesses, there has been little comment on the strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats, of the political policy direction being pursued. In particular, what are the implications for the integration and consolidation of services, which had been the “joined-up” services policy ambition of previous governments and, for health and social care services, remain the declared ambition of the current government? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper considers the potential impact on children’s social work services and child protection from the government’s policy and regulatory changes which open up all children’s social work to the market place.

Particular concerns are noted that the changes now being allowed and promoted will lead to greater fragmentation rather than integration.

This is the first paper to reflect on the government’s push and preference for the unregulated market place it created in 2014 for children’s social work, including child protection.