Effective Child Protection

This book is a great catalyst for not only practitioners working with children and families but also those studying this area. The continually evolving nature of child protection and working with families and children is central to the approach take n in the text and affords the reader opportunity to consider their role, practice and professional development needs. The books overall design and approach enable professionals and students to consider how effective child Protection might be shaped, facilitated and evaluated while offering a critical yet balanced perspective on the challenges in working is such contexts.  

Eileen Munro is Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, London, UK. With a background in both philosophy and social work, her work has focused on the reasoning skills needed to provide an effective child protection service. The work was taken up by many child protection services in several countries but, in working with management and practitioners to improve risk assessment and decision making, she realised that the individual decision maker is strongly influenced by organizational and social factors that also need to be understood in order to reduce error. A powerful framework for doing this is provided by the systems approach to investigating error that was developed in aviation and has been adapted to medicine in the US and UK. Professor Munro then worked with the Social Care Institute for Excellence in the UK to adapt this approach to use in child protection services and it is now being adopted widely in England. At the request of the Secretary of State for Education, she undertook a review of child protection in England and published the final report in April 2011, followed by a progress report in May 2012.

Her extensive consultancy work with child protection services in higher-income countries as well as her academic work makes her well qualified to pull together an overview of the issues in child protection.

Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Child Protection Agencies as Complex Adaptive Systems Chapter 3: Expertise in Child Protection Work Chapter 4: Evaluating complex interventions Chapter 5: The social context Chapter 6: Defining child abuse and neglect Chapter 7: The Challenges of Managing Uncertainty in Practice Chapter 8: The process of managing risk Chapter 9: Decision making Chapter 10: How organisations can support more effective practice Chapter 11: Conclusion