Family and Childrens' Services, the child welfare agency in my town in Ontario, Canada is launching a new effort that aims to get neighbours, friends, and non-state/informal community supports involved in providing support and safety to families and children in crisis, to reduce the need for more intrusive social worker/state intervention.
Do you know of places where this has been tried/is being done? Models/approaches we can look at?
What about recent research/literature on community-based approaches to child protection?
Hi Robert, I think if I was approaching this task I would use ecomaps and systems theory to consider the role of wider family, charitable organisations and the community in supporting children and families who are struggling. There may also be some useful information within the literature for family group conferences which involves working with families and other significant friends to support children to remain safely at home. This would involve prep work with the involved people and a meeting to agree a plan moving forward. Then there would be an assigned person to take the lead with this plan who would be able to contact agencies if concerns were raised. Some local authorities in the UK have started to consider the role of those outside of the family group to support but have also had to carefully consider confidentiality for the involved families.
Thanks, these are some great suggestions. Do you know of any academic literature that describes these kinds of approaches?
FGC started in New Zealand and I believe is based on Maori culture. I dont have any articles or books I have been using recently but a quick search has found these: Nothing without me by Merkel-Holguin 2020; Family group conference research : Reflection and ways forward. Annie deRoo 2021; Systems theory for social work and helping professions (book) Werner Schurmer 2019 and Effective social work with children, young people and families- putting systems into practice 2012 Steven Walker (book). In the UK we have also been running the "supporting families project" (was called troubled families for a while!) there is some research on this which you may find interesting. This project was government created through local housing authorities initially and supported people back to work or with debt management, poor school attendance and antisocial behaviour etc - this is also a systems approach and there is some research on this - try "The troubled families programme: learning about policy impact through realistic case study research" by Sadie Parr et al 2020. As I say, not children's services led initially but has now been absorbed into our work since it has evolved so much. It is based on getting the needs of the family met before they become high risk.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Geoscience
- Asia
- India