Key points
Where the social worker has completed enough of their enquiry to believe that the child is suffering, or at risk of suffering, significant harm, they should hold a strategy discussion to decide whether to call an initial child protection conference.
How to do it
Members of the strategy discussion should question the worker about why they think the child is at risk. It can be useful to think about the following questions, drawn from an overview of serious case reviews:
- what is the child’s own view about life at home or in care?
- how does the child respond to their parents or their carers?
- what is life like for this child in this family?
- how is this child different from others in the family, at school or in the street?
Lessons from research
Research by Eileen Munro points out that people tend to make a judgment about other people, or a situation, very quickly. Once they have done this, they tend to focus on information that confirms their view while ignoring information that contradicts it. Because of this, when discussing a case the manager should ask the worker to consider other points of view.
Reder and Duncan, in their work on serious case reviews and child death inquiries, identify what they call ‘closed professional systems’ where workers develop fixed views of a case, or where polarisation takes place between two different groups of workers with different views. Sometimes one person’s views are given too much weight, or there can be confusion about who is doing what. It helps to take an objective view of the professional dynamics and check if everyone is clear about their role. See Reder P and Duncan S: Lost Innocents: a follow up study of fatal child abuse (1999).
