The Whole Picture

When endeavouring to safeguard children it is vital to communicate and work with other professionals in order to gather information about the child and the family situation or circumstances. In the absence of information from the range of professionals working with the child and the family, your ability to keep children safe is compromised due to your lack of critical information.

Working in partnership with other professionals and agencies then is key to enable social workers to form plans and strategies to ensure a child's safety or reduce their risk of harm.

However, professionals from different agencies sometimes have different expectations and views about how to work with children and these views can become more polarised when the child has very complex needs and worse still, if the child goes on to make allegations disclosing that one set of professionals are or have been involved in physically abusing them.

We all know that if a child makes such an allegation that they have to be listened to and their disclosures taken seriously, even if that child has made allegations before which have been 'pretty much' considered to have been false or at least inconclusive and that child has abused other children and professionals.

The scene then seems set for conflict between opposing professionals and point scoring behaviour, when it should be focused on cooperatively working together to provide the child with safety, security and a consistent message.

When allegations of abuse are made against any group of professionals, it leads inevitably to a sense of insecurity because your behaviour, practice and actions are under investigation and your reputation and future within your profession are on the line. The outcome is arguably severest on those professionals who are viewed and experience themselves as being lower down on the power scale, such as care, residential social workers, or foster carers.

With professional's level of security undermined as a result of a child's allegations, the impact can result not only in professionals leaving the profession, but in it being impossible to protect or safeguard the child concerned.

If for example, this occurs in a care home and several members of staff have been alleged to have physically abused the child then those staff, who are now under investigation, cannot work or be involved with the child until or unless the investigation is completed and it's concluded that the allegations are unfounded or inconclusive.

As a consequence, this could result in a child with very complex needs being left in a position where their safety and the safety of others is jeopardised because there is no one in a position to safely care for him or her.

There are no doubt many important points of learning for all concerned but it is crucial that as a group of professionals concerned with a child's safety and welfare that we are encouraged to always see the bigger picture within the child's world. We as social workers, care or residential staff, health workers and teachers for example will all have our discrete areas of knowledge and skills but we have to always hold in our minds the wider picture for the children we work with.

There are no easy answers because we have to listen to and act appropriately with regards to a child's disclosures but as professionals we need also to hold a healthy sense of balance. In that we can all be placed in a position where we are under investigation...'and there by the grace of god do we all go.'