For Love and For Justice / Part 117 / Zabeth and Paul Bayne

Some Realities in Child Protection from which Reform must Emerge Yet Again.

In British Columbia, the Child, Family and Community Service Act (CFCSA, 1996) direct child welfare policy and that document specifies both an ideological and legal framework that proposes least intrusive methods. By that I mean that child protection interventions are only set in motion when a child’s safety falls below minimum community security standards. The identification and alleviation of risk factors that are present in a child’s surroundings is the controlling principle for intervention.

Child protection in our culture receives its mandate from legislation. Our B.C. communities fundamentally support this mandate. Citizens report their suspicions of child maltreatment. Both the legal mandate and public participation validates this child protective function. Even though child protection is considered an essential public service, many people take issue with ways by which child protection is administered. In fact, as with other essential services, such as the police, the public routinely condemns the service for perceived failures and shortcomings. The response of government has been episodic attempts at child protection reform, typified by inquiries, escalated research, reorganizing administration and altering the service delivery model, changing the staff training, or hiring additional staff, or staff with different competencies or slashing the budget and then recuperating the budget.

Child protection as it is presently configured, acquires its cases primarily through reactive processes. For example, citizens, such as neighbours, friends, acquaintances, family members or other observers of the family can and do report protection concerns. Volunteers and employees in youth-services, in schools, churches, childcare, nurses and doctors are all legally and ethically required to report their suspicions of maltreatment. Police when summoned to an urgency where children might be at risk, will file protection concerns. This is the reactive basis of child protection. The reality is that child mistreatment cannot be entirely prevented. Since no single intervention has been found to be effective in preventing or curing child maltreatment, responding to or attempting to prevent further maltreatment are the options left to responders who are charged with this.

Of course in making those observations I haven’t begun to touch upon the manner by which child protection workers affect their tasks as first responders and ongoing workers with the children, with the parents, with the people under suspicion of maltreating a child.

(A well written Master's thesis by Nathan Patton entitled 'Child Protection as a Culture of Negotiation' in 2009 infomred my thinking about the reality of the current status of child protection.)