Research over the past two decades has identified the perceptions of service users, mainly parents, engaged with the child protection system (Buckley 2017; Buckley et al. 201 la; De Boer and Coady 2007). This chapter extends this understanding to consider the experiences within the prevailing child protection discourse of all key stakeholders including families, children, foster carers and child protection practitioners. It will demonstrate that despite an overall positive aspiration to promote the welfare of children, the current approach fails to respond to the diverse needs and difficulties of the population and inadvertently alienates many of those who need assistance to prevent further escalation of their difficulties. The first part of the chapter outlines the type of system required to promote children's safety and well-being and demonstrates the conflicting values underpinning child protection processes that operate in most of the English speaking world. It then examines the way that children and young people experience services that are set up to help them, and their ideal view of how child protection would work best for them. Children that live in care are exceptionally dependent on the quality of social care and social work. Therefore, we examine the interface between current child protection practice and the out-of-home care (OOHC) system, exploring ideas about how the quality of care can be enhanced within a different policy framework.
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Without question, a relationship-based approach is key to effective practice and the achievement of this is dependent on a stable and positively disposed workforce that can work collaboratively to gain trust and motivate families in the interests of their children's welfare. In Anglophone countries, the adversarial nature of statutory child care, highlighted by court processes, is known to challenge the ability of child protection staff to operate according to the principles of their profession, hence the high rate of disillusionment and turnover in statutory social work in particular. The chapter concludes by considering the aspects of the current system that are the most detrimental to good practice and by outlining how a public health model would, by addressing each of the domains discussed here, better meet the needs of children and families.