Social care - How to safeguard minority children

In the London borough of Tower Hamlets 60 per cent of under-19s come from the Bangladeshi community with another 17 per cent from other ethnic minority groups.

Given the borough's composition, the safeguarding needs of children in these communities is a constant focal point for the local safeguarding children board.

A four-month study undertaken by the council alongside charity Coram and DMSS consultants, has tried to discover whether child protection services in the borough are reaching children from every ethnic group.

There were concerns from members of the local safeguarding children board that certain communities were over- or under-represented in numbers of child protection plans, social care referrals, and care orders. So researchers attempted to look beyond the statistics.

Behind the figures

"Local authorities need to take great care when looking at figures. It is important not to jump to conclusions, but to find out what is happening beneath them," explains Sophie Laws, policy and research manager at Coram.

By interviewing different agencies involved in child protection, voluntary organisations and people in the community, the researchers tried to establish the key barriers to effective safeguarding practices.

Monawara Bakht, the local safeguarding board co-ordinator, says: "Sometimes you need to have an independent perspective on what you think you know.

"We wanted to find out how the needs of our larger minority groups are being met but also to find out more about newer and smaller communities and whether we were meeting these changing needs."

The Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets is well established and work with them has developed over a number of years (see below). But the findings revealed that newer and smaller ethnic groups had less contact with child protection services.

They showed that Somali, Chinese, Vietnamese and Eastern European communities tended to make less use of preventative services and some respondents felt the needs of these communities were not as well understood.

Laws explains: "Tower Hamlets has historically done a great deal of work in trying to make its services culturally sensitive to the large Bangladeshi community.

"But as with much of London there are a lot more smaller communities arriving. While some of the lessons learned from dealing with the larger groups can be transferred, the more significant barriers can be specific to each group."

Understanding minorities

For example, the report highlights that communities that have high fears about immigration are unlikely to approach the authorities with concerns about a child.

"What is encouraging is that our strategies have been successful to date," says Bakht. "The challenge for us now is that although we may have a very large ethnic population we have to remember that it is very diverse and we need to unpick that."

Mor Dioum, director of the Victoria Climbie Foundation, welcomes the work undertaken by Tower Hamlets and thinks that more councils should develop a better understanding of ethnic minorities as a way of strengthening child protection.

He says: "This kind of work should be conducted across the board, but it should not stop here. We should now look to see how these findings can be put into policy and practice."

PROTECTION IN PRACTICE - Building a relationship with the Muslim community in Tower Hamlets

Foyzul Hoque is Tower Hamlet's Muslim children's safeguarding co-ordinator. He works to understand, educate and build relationships with the Muslim communities within the borough in order to meet the safeguarding needs of children.

"I work with all the mosques and madrasas in the borough to create and establish child protection policy and procedures," he says. "I give child protection training to all the imams and the senior people within the community."

Another part of Hoque's job is working with families to raise awareness of child protection issues such as domestic violence and the sexual exploitation of Bangladeshi girls.

Through regular seminars he invites members of the community to learn about the key factors that are putting children at risk.

He says: "We are developing guidance about boundaries because police have told us that a lot of the abuse that takes place relates to disciplining children."

In addition to this, Hoque provides advice to social workers on simple questions about whether it is culturally sensitive to visit a home in the day during Ramadan, to more complex situations requiring cultural sensitivity.

The Muslim safeguarding position was created in 2005 and since then Hoque has noticed a significant shift in relations between the council and ethnic minority communities.

He says: "People are definitely more open now than when I started. It was very difficult to talk about serious issues before. Five years ago people were in complete denial about sexual exploitation."

While Hoque is pleased to see the good links that have been made, he is keen to see his position expand and for the council to take on more safeguarding officers to reach different communities.

He adds: "While I do get help from social workers who come from different backgrounds, the work with newer communities is definitely still in its infancy."