The Limits of State Power Private Rights by Lauren Devine

Author:Lauren Devine [Devine, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Work, Law, Family Law, General, Children, Sociology, Marriage & Family, Political Science, Public Policy, Social Services & Welfare
ISBN: 9781317662266
Google: 9C8lDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-03-16T03:25:32+00:00

Figure 5.1

Smith’s schema.

In Figure 5.2 the assessment stages are reproduced beside Smith’s schema to tie the stages of each process together.

Figure 5.2

Mapping the assessment procedures.

The stages of the assessment procedures in ‘child protection’ and ‘safeguarding’ schema

Stage 1 – Class membership: moving from surveillance to targeted interference – the referral

The first stage of Smith’s schema mirrors the initiation of the assessment procedure following a referral, which may arise via a child being observed as failing to fulfil the prediction models of development, through the need for services, neglect, parental insufficiency or injury, or to have suffered ‘child abuse’.19 There were 657,800 such referrals in 2013/14.20

Class membership transfers families from a population comprising all families to a smaller class of referred families. This moves the family into the assessment process. Smith identifies the threshold for class membership as ‘a definite rule must have been broken or a norm deviated from’.21 A referral, put simply, is a suspicion that an individual, in this case a parent, has broken a societal rule, or ‘norm’, concerning the welfare of children. This could occur deliberately, through an inability to adequate provide for the needs of their child or failure to ensure an environment with an acceptably low level of risk. In such situations the family and its members become subjects of the system. However, the assessment process goes further than Smith’s criteria of a ‘definite rule’ that has been broken: it requires assessment on ‘reasonable suspicion’ of significant harm, not on ‘fact’. The parameters of the ‘definite rule’ is thus unclear: terms such as ‘child abuse’, ‘safeguarding’, ‘concern’, ‘risk’ and ‘need’ are not clearly defined. The plight of the subject within the schema who should not be there is not addressed, other than an assumption they reach a ‘dead-end’ in the process and progress no further. In modern safeguarding this may mean the outcome is recorded in terms of a need for early intervention. Recording a ‘wrong’ decision to refer is very unlikely to occur.

When receiving a referral, a local authority must translate the incoming data via a written account leading them to decide whether they ‘have reasonable cause to suspect that a child who lives, or is found, in their area is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm’.22 Or is in need because:

(a)

he is unlikely to achieve or maintain, or to have the opportunity of achieving or maintaining, a reasonable standard of health or development without the provision for him of services by a local authority . . .

(b)

his health or development is likely to be significantly impaired, or further impaired, without the provision for him of such services; or

(c)

he is disabled.23

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