Re: Changes in patterns of child neglect

[Hasan <h.dervish@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The same pattern is occuring here in London UK. I have worked in two
boroughs over the past three years and have seen a rise in the number of
children's names being placed on the boroughs child protection register
under the category of neglect.

I saw this coming about five years ago when there was a change in social
services "take" on child protection and children in need. There was a
real big push to cut down the numbers of children on the register for
various abuses. The main  reasons given for this were:
childrens names on the register is stigmatising and punitive of parents
(the underlying belief here was that "abusers" were suffered some kind
of social deprivation / inequality).
It's hard to get a conviction of an adult for abuse of a child.
Social services should be about partnership,
though I argued that it is possible to assess the situational abuse from
the chronic / pathological. Most parents were intelligent to the need to
prevent the harm happening again and intended to do something about it.
But some parents were just nasty pieces of work.

There were some other factors.
the process is traumatic for the child.
there fore because of the above  more children are remaining at home in
potentially risky situations where there is insufficient evidence to
prove/determine the exact type of risk the child faces and social
workers are feeling they should promote partnership (though resource
limitations forces them to take a "partnership approach", in many cases
the social worker is the only resource ! so what choice do they have.

Another big influence may be the caseload of workers not allowing time
for them to productively engage with families.
The category of neglect is a back door way of getting children on the
register when the tolderance threshold for names being placed on the
register under other categories goes up to make services look good.