Communicating with Children and Their Families

Communication in social work has always been regarded as a basic skill, just as human relationships were seen as the medium for interactions that led to change and improvement in the lives of users of services. This is therefore a timely book because it seeks to reassert such skills by placing them within the very challenging environments many of us work within. The book is grounded in the context of neo-liberal social policy and is therefore highly political in its challenge to orthodoxy. The authors skilfully and successfully weave recognisable scenarios that offer detailed analysis based on up-to-date practice and excellent policy review. They achieve this through the use of five practice examples which will be familiar to many of us: the first centres on engagement and concerns a teenager being groomed by a remote adult online; the second—negotiation—involves an obese child whose situation is discussed between involved agencies; the third surrounds investigation using a scenario similar to that of Peter Connelly; the fourth the use of power against the background of an unaccompanied sixteen-year-old Afghan asylum seeker; and finally persistence, which revolves around the resource-driven incorrect categorisation of a disabled child. All of this focuses in detail on the day-to-day communications between workers, children, parents and colleagues that can determine whether interventions will result in barriers, further issues or success. The authors do not shy away from controversy and wade into debates over such matters as professional dangerousness, family support versus child protection, assessment versus investigation, and unhelpful changes in child protection practice in England and Wales.

Child protection · Context (archaeology) · Negotiation · Political science · Power (physics) · Psychological intervention · Public relations · Sociology · Work (physics) · Engineering · History · Law · Psychology · Research in Social Sciences

• Radically seeking social justice for children and survivors of abuse

  Nora Duckett, Helen Spandler•Critical and Radical Social Work•2018

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