Protecting children is not a precise science or art. For children, particularly the very young, who are at risk of significant harm from their parents and/or carers, it is a very complex and continuous process.
Professionals such as social workers, health visitors, GPs, hospital doctors, nurses, mental health practitioners, schools, police officers and probation officers, magistrates, judges and others, have a vital and sometimes impossible role to perform in protecting vulnerable children.
Before vulnerable children and young persons can be protected, there has to be clear identification of those who are at risk of significant harm, how high the risk is, who poses the risk, and how, and under what circumstances the risk is likely to materialise. There needs to be more work done to enhance the assessment of risk and the predicting of those vulnerable children who are at the most or highest risk of suffering significant harm.
When an ‘at risk’ child is at home, his or her safety has to be largely dependent on his/her parents and carers and involved extended family members, as the child spends most of his/her time with their family. Social workers and other key or core group members do play a valuable role, but they, in comparison with the parents and family, normally spend only a small amount of time with the child, and probably not when the child could be at his/her most vulnerable periods, e.g, bath-times, mealtimes and bed-times and behind closed doors.
It is right that society should place a high premium on keeping our children safe and promoting their welfare. This means that every adult should take some collective responsibility for safeguarding not only his/her children, but other people’s children as well. This is not an easy task, as our society, in our attempt to protect our children from the minority who would and do abuse them, has developed a culture of inculcating our children to be mistrustful of people, particularly men. Similarly, while on the one hand parents are being blamed by politicians and others for not being good parents and rearing well-behaved children, these same politicians and social scientists are nurturing a culture in which parents are being be at risk of being criminalised for reasonably chastising their children.
Society has to better differentiate between what constitutes child abuse and significant harm, and what is reasonable chastisement which, although it might result in some harm, is not significant harm. If society removes the right of parents to apply the latter, it is not inconceivable that it could give rise to the former at a later time.
Providing more clarity about what constitutes reasonable chastisement would enable more resources to be channeled into focusing on the minority of parents and carers who poses a high risk of significantly harming their children. It is of course the case that many will take an absolutist perspective and declare that no physical chastisement of a child is justified,
In the case of very young children who have been identified as being at very high risk of significant harm, and where it has been decided that they should not be removed from the care of their parents/carers, it might be prudent for society to begin to consider whether more use should be made of invasive technology. This could include parents being required to cooperate with some aspects of the at risk children’s care being observed, monitored and promoted at specific times by the use of live video-recording in the family’s home. This technique could also be use to provide ‘live’ parenting lessons and support for such parents.
In order to provide the oftentimes intensive support which the parents and families of children who are at risk of being seriously harmed require, there is a need for more and better trained professionals in the multi-disciplinary teams and agencies which are charged with protecting highly vulnerable children. The court system and relevant legislative framework also needs to return to the premise of the paramountcy of the child’s welfare in all matters pertaining to the safety and welfare of the child, once significant harm or it’s likelihood has been sufficiently evidenced.
The challenge of safeguarding vulnerable children is not an objective which is going to prove successful in all cases; there is never going to be zero failure rate. Thus the politicians and child welfare advocates will continue to maintain its politicization.The politics of safeguarding children are such that
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