Effective Child Protection

Front Cover
SAGE, May 19, 2008 - Social Science - 192 pages
′Effective Child Protection is a significant contribution to child welfare practice and policy...Munro offers a pathway to achieving better outcomes for children and families who are recipients of child protection services′ - Children and Youth Services Review

Praise for the First Edition:

`The book makes the fully justified claim [that] it will be essential reading for professionals undergoing qualifying and post-qualifying training. It is to be hoped that it will enjoy an even wider readership′ - Child Abuse Review

This new edition is essential reading for anyone concerned with improving child protection practice. Building on the strengths of the first edition, it provides a deeper understanding of how practice judgements and decisions can be improved in child protection work.

Updates include:

- an account of how intuition, emotion, and analytic thinking are combined in practice

- an analysis of how the nature of the task determines what combination is needed

- an updated chapter on how we can detect errors

- new material on how organisations can promote good reasoning skills

- a simpler way to understand risk assessment instruments.

Illustrated with detailed case studies throughout, it will be invaluable reading for students, researchers and practitioners in all areas of child protection, including social work, education, health and policing.

Eileen Munro is a Reader in Social Policy at the London School of Economics, specialising in child protection. Other publications include Child Protection (SAGE 2006).

 

Contents

1 Introduction
1
2 Expertise in Child Protection Work
7
3 The Social Context
28
4 Defining Child Abuse
46
5 The Difficulties of Assessing Risk
58
6 The Process of Assessing Risk
76
7 Making Decisions
95
8 Minimising Mistakes
125
9 Conclusion
153
References
161
Index
171
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

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.

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