Safeguarding Children conference: clear insights to help tackle abuse

Speaking at CYP Now's Safeguarding Children conference on 27 March, Andrew Webb set the scene for why children's services need to think differently about how child protection services are provided in the future.

As he prepared to relinquish his presidency of the Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS), Webb highlighted the fact that despite increasing demands on children's services, local authority spending will have dropped to 2005/06 levels by next year.

"We need to create a much lower unit cost for everything we do while keeping the same number of children in the system, or we have to look differently at the system."

The conference featured 10 policy and practice sessions covering a wide range of safeguarding issues, and these were some of the highlights.

Child neglect: why lived experience is the key

Jan Horwath, professor of child welfare at the University of Sheffield, has been working with four local safeguarding children's boards to improve the way children's social workers respond to neglect.

The move followed research she conducted that found that intervention planning was not achieving the desired outcomes for children.

"We know there's incredible pressure on children's social care to patch up and dispatch," Horwath said. "Performance indicators are all geared up to keeping children on child protection plans for a short period of time.

"So as soon as there's some indication that things are improving, we close the case as a child protection case."

Horwath found that practitioners were not getting to the nub of the problem for a number of reasons. This could be because they were "distracted" by the mother's needs and took what she told them at face value. It was also often the case that children's social workers focused on the "presenting problem" rather than the root cause.

"If you are going out to a family because you are concerned about lack of supervision, it's all too easy to focus on those incidents when parents went to the pub and left the child unsupervised, and think about responding to those presenting problems rather than why the parents left the child and what it says about their attitude towards the child," she said.

This scenario means the local authority is required to work with the family again each time the situation worsens, at a cost to the public purse and to the detriment of the child's welfare.

Horwath's solution, which is being developed alongside four local authorities, is that social workers should aim to find out what each day is like for every child in the family being worked with - their "daily lived experience".

"Is their daily lived experience different at weekends?" she said. "Is it different depending on who is in the house caring for them? What happens at holidays? We really need to find out what happens to the child from the moment they wake up in the morning to when they go to bed at night.

"We also need to know how the parent understands a day in the life of the child. Do they have a different perception of what the child is doing, and how does the parent spend their day?"

She said that the approach has started showing results. Social workers feel better prepared to take decisions about what will benefit the family and keep children safe. And parents can be better able to understand the implications of their behaviour on the lives of their children.

"It is by comparing what the lived experience of the child is like with that of the parent that you can then begin to see why that child is being neglected," Horwath said. "It provides a better understanding of the child's needs and risk factors.

"It enables meaningful conversations between practitioners, carers and children.

"If you can give the parents something tangible to hook into, they can begin to see why we as professionals are concerned."

Domestic violence: engaging perpetrators

Around two-thirds of child protection cases have domestic abuse as a feature, according to estimates.

Despite this, Ben Jamal, chief executive of the Domestic Violence Intervention Project (DVIP) charity, says that children's services departments too often fail to tackle the issue in an effective way.

Many fail to engage with the perpetrator, meaning they have little idea of his attitude, or the extent to which he is aware of the impact on the children of his abuse.

"The focus instead is on the mother and their capacity to protect," Jamal says.

"Very often in child protection conferences, we see recommendations that the mother must ensure that children are not exposed to further violence from the father and if she doesn't meet that recommendation, then the children will be removed.

"There is no proper analysis of the risks and what kind of support the mother needs to achieve separation if it's required."

DVIP has for 20 years worked with both perpetrators and victims in groups and on a one-to-one basis offering services on behaviour change and support for victims. It has now begun placing staff in local authority children's social care departments - including Westminster and Hackney.

The in-house service includes case consultation; referral and risk assessment of male perpetrators; and referral and identification of support needs for female victims and survivors.

Children's social workers also receiving training on dealing with cases where domestic abuse is present.

Success rates are good. In 70 per cent of cases of men who complete a DVIP programme, there is a cessation of physical abuse. Meanwhile, the training on offer was found to improve the way children's social workers dealt with domestic violence as an issue.

Jamal said: "We know the model is replicable and we've already extended it to three other boroughs across London."

However, he added that there are some "real challenges" to making the approach work, including ensuring support for staff, some of whom can experience cultural isolation.

"All of them were the only voluntary/external agency sat in the social work teams in which they were working.

"They had to have real confidence about identifying which bits of practice they believe should be done in a different way."

He added that changes in public law proceedings - the introduction of 26-week timescales - has resulted in a reduction in the use of external expertise in some areas.

"It may result in more children being taken into care because there is insufficient time to allow treatment interventions or support to take place," he said.

"It makes it even more important for us to develop models of partnership working that break down barriers to a proper co-ordinated response."

Information sharing: multi-agency hubs

Multi-agency safeguarding hubs (Mash) are an increasingly popular way to ensure joined-up working and information sharing is used to protect children and young people.

Marisa De Jager, a social care manager and Mash consultant, highlighted the importance of information that can be accessed through the system to identify possible child abuse or neglect, when it could otherwise have been missed.

She explained that a Mash - which typically involves a co-located team of practitioners from children's services, police, health services, mental health, probation, education and the third sector - works collaboratively to analyse information and spot early signs of abuse or neglect.

In the on-going case of a three-year-old girl, one Mash was able to identify serious concerns that may otherwise have been missed.

"Her mother called in to social care offices saying she was very concerned - believing her daughter is being sexually abused," De Jager said.

"But during the interview, it is established she doesn't really have any significant evidence.

"It is established that the mother is having a custody battle at the moment, doesn't have full-time care of her daughter, and can't really say what the issues of concern are.

"At that point, we looked at our database and saw that there was a number of verbal abuse incidents between mum and dad because of the custody battle - also we saw the child abuse investigation teams had the same kind of allegation made to them, also by the mum."

De Jager said that in normal circumstances there would not have been sufficient evidence to intervene and because Cafcass was involved, it would ordinarily have been closed.

However, due to her concern around the case, a decision was taken to launch a Mash inquiry. Because of the lack of evidence, the referral was initially given a 'green' (low risk rating).

"During the inquiry, we uncovered that the girl was in a network of known offenders," De Jager said.

"We looked at mum's household, and who she was associated with, looked at dad and his associates, and uncovered 16 known sex offenders around this child. We knew that because we had access to both the police national database and the sex offenders' register.

"We were easily able to access information from all our partners in line with what was identified and had a meeting to get together to look at the individual risks that everyone identified."

It was discovered that the apparent network spread as far as from Cumbria down to Dorset and Cornwall - and it was discovered that, at some point, the three-year-old had been in Cornwall and Cumbria.

"It was flagged as a red case straight away," De Jager said. "We immediately took action and the little girl was accommodated because it was the only way to deal with it at that point."