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Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Social Work in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zululand, 2009. / This study is about the research that the writer conducted based on how service providers could be helped to render effective services with special reference to street children. It is believed that this study will be considered as a field based social development practice concerned with child protection and improvement of antisocial behaviour. This research was conducted in order to firstly, establish the existence of reunification programmes in the shelters that secure street children after having been picked up from the streets. Secondly, it intended to investigate in the event the programmes were available, who were actually involved during their evaluation, for example, service providers, government officials, families of street children and street children themselves. The study also intended to examine the effectiveness of those programmes. If they were available what remedy can be employed in order to improve the relationship between the reunified vulnerable street children and their families. During data collection in June 2006 concerning this study it emanated that six (6) 89% service providers did not have reunification programmes. Only one (1) 11% Government Place of Safety uses the monitoring forms to assess the progress of the street children during institutionallsationperiod. Even the said forms do not reach the objective of rehabilitating the children because children abscond before the end of the monitoring exercise. And without the direction file of the child's home, it is hard to track down the child and get response from the family about the progress of the child. In terms of Sec 69(i) of Social Welfare White Paper 1997 the State had planned to develop programmes concerning provision of safe environment and taking care of homeless young adults and those surviving on the streets. But these goals have not yet been achieved. The service providers even confessed that they lacked skills on how to deal with problematic children other than providing safety and security until the child decides to reunify with his or her family. The study was conducted in Durban, Empangeni, Richards Bay, Eshowe, Nqutu, Nkandla and Newcastle in the KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. (Due to research confidentiality ethical reasons, the real names of institutions visited will not be revealed). Lastly, the researcher prepared standardised Reunification Program Manuals (hereinafter called Behaviour Modification Treatment Model Manual) and Participation Action Research Manuals and issued them to the service providers for future use.

The concepts of risk and safety are central to social work practice with survivors of violence against women, especially within the child protection system. Recent studies have highlighted how discrepancies between client and worker perceptions may create problematic conditions for developing effective intervention strategies (Dumbrill, 2006; Jenney, Alaggia, Mazzuca, & Redmond, 2005). In addition, tensions exist between movement toward improving worker-client interactions through collaboration and the use of standardized risk and safety assessments as a means of improving practice. The purpose of this research study was to explore how women’s narratives of domestic violence (DV), expressed within the context of child protection services (CPS), become translated into CPS workers’ assessments of risk and need for safety planning. Using Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM), this qualitative study used focus group and interview data to explore how both workers and clients’ experiences of the process of risk assessment and safety planning influenced the course of the intervention. What emerged is that workers and clients held similar representations about the social construction/collective representation of woman abuse and the work of CPS. For both worker and client participants the concept of ‘doing the right thing’ presented itself as an over-arching theme. This theme implies that there is a perceived ‘right way’ of addressing DV cases within CPS work and enhances understanding about the ways in which social workers and clients interact. These findings illustrate how narrative structures shape interactions that take place within the context of care and prevention, manifesting themselves in complex ways that can lead to misunderstanding the impact on children, the (un) conscious subjugation of women victims, and the absence of dialogue about the role of men in addressing DV at a system level.

The concepts of risk and safety are central to social work practice with survivors of violence against women, especially within the child protection system. Recent studies have highlighted how discrepancies between client and worker perceptions may create problematic conditions for developing effective intervention strategies (Dumbrill, 2006; Jenney, Alaggia, Mazzuca, & Redmond, 2005). In addition, tensions exist between movement toward improving worker-client interactions through collaboration and the use of standardized risk and safety assessments as a means of improving practice. The purpose of this research study was to explore how women’s narratives of domestic violence (DV), expressed within the context of child protection services (CPS), become translated into CPS workers’ assessments of risk and need for safety planning. Using Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM), this qualitative study used focus group and interview data to explore how both workers and clients’ experiences of the process of risk assessment and safety planning influenced the course of the intervention. What emerged is that workers and clients held similar representations about the social construction/collective representation of woman abuse and the work of CPS. For both worker and client participants the concept of ‘doing the right thing’ presented itself as an over-arching theme. This theme implies that there is a perceived ‘right way’ of addressing DV cases within CPS work and enhances understanding about the ways in which social workers and clients interact. These findings illustrate how narrative structures shape interactions that take place within the context of care and prevention, manifesting themselves in complex ways that can lead to misunderstanding the impact on children, the (un) conscious subjugation of women victims, and the absence of dialogue about the role of men in addressing DV at a system level.

This thesis explores the everyday practices, relationships and interactions in a Probation Unit of the Department of Probation and Child Care Services in the Central Province in Sri Lanka. Using multi-sited ethnography and the ethnographer’s own experiences in this sector it examines how frontline workers at the Probation Unit engage and draw upon international and national development discourse, ideas and theories of children and childhood to engage with colleagues and clients. This thesis takes as its analytical starting point that state agencies are sites where global development discourse meets local practices. Simultaneously, they are sites where ideas and practices of nationalism, class, morality and professional identity are produced and reproduced. State sector employment is an important source of social mobility, gaining respectability and constructing a middle class identity. Thus, maintaining the ‘in-between’ position in relation to the upper and lower classes is an especially anxiety-ridden and challenging process for state bureaucrats. This shapes the particular characteristics of their nationalism, morality and professional identity and influences the way in which they translate policies and engage with institutional and bureaucratic procedures. This thesis examines this process in detail and illustrates its translocal nature. More explicitly it looks at the ways in which development discourse and practice is transformed by the forms of sociality that it engenders. The ethnography illustrates that this process allows for development policies and interventions to be co-opted in particular ways that articulate ideas and practices of nationalism, class, morality and professional identity. Through this cooption, the outcomes of development policies and interventions are transformed in unanticipated ways. The broader social and political process that transforms development policies and practices remains only partially visible to development projects and programmes. The complexity and in particular the historicity of social and political contexts remains outside development project logic and timelines. To understand the relationship between policy and practice or to evaluate development outcomes is meaningless if development is conceptualised as something that stands apart from society. What is most useful to understand, and indeed revealing, is how actors make meaning of development policies and programmes as part of everyday practices in historically situated social and political contexts. The thesis concludes that theorising, analysing or even critiquing development’s transformative potential is misleading as it fails to recognise that what is being transformed is development itself.

Child protection is an area of Police work that has grown in the last decade, involving Police Officers working in departments that specialise in the investigation of cases of child abuse. Although Police Officers in this field may be at greater risk of experiencing Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS), there remains a paucity of research in this area of policing. Analogies can be drawn to existing research in policing and with social service workers involved in child protection.A mixed methodology was used to conduct the study and involved a self-completion postal questionnaire, followed up by a longitudinal case study of three of the trainee Detective Officers. The questionnaire sample consisted of 63 Detective Officers involved in the investigation of child abuse within the host Police Force, including Detective Constables, Sergeants and Inspectors.The Study found that 51% of the respondents experienced a degree of STS, findings that are suggestive that STS is being experienced by a significant portion of Detective Officers who, as part of their daily duties, investigate child protection cases. The longitudinal case study found that 2 out of the 3 cases indicated that their views and experiences of the symptoms of STS changed mid way through their training.The implications for Police Forces to provide safe working environments and appropriate counselling for employees as a tool to manage stress, to inform practice and from which the basis of reasonable precautions, risk assessments, monitoring and appropriate interventions will be discussed.

This thesis presents a qualitative study investigating the understandings of social workers from non-statutory settings (health, hospital and mental health) of their assessment practices with children and families where child protection concerns have been identified. The study aims were to describe the considerations social workers identified as significant when undertaking such an assessment, as well as gain insight about how these considerations interact and relate. The study was developed under a constructivist paradigm influenced by post-modern and post-structuralist thinking. Data collection involved a semi-structured in-depth interview based on concepts drawn from reflective practice and the critical incident technique. The participants were asked about their agency, their role and a recent case in which they had undertaken an assessment. Data collection and analysis were consistent with constructivist grounded theory methods. Review of the literature suggests that social workers in statutory child protection practice and other settings consider factors relating to the case, themselves and their context in their assessment practice. Similar conclusions have been reached through this study. This study is unique in being the only qualitative study of social work assessment practices with child protection cases in non-statutory settings in NSW, to date. The study found that social workers identified a range of considerations as important in their assessment practice. These considerations have been grouped thematically as context, relationship, intervention, content and self, in the presentation of findings in this thesis. These themes interact and relate in ways that are unique to the individual assessment circumstances rather than in a regular or consistent manner. The findings of the study are relevant to social work practitioners, educators and researchers. The study furthers the understanding of social work assessment practice, and develops a clearer understanding and articulation of what is recognised and termed as ‘tacit knowledge’ or ‘practice wisdom’ in this particular area of social work practice. / Masters Thesis

In the Child Protection work, the part that may have major impact on the family parent-child relationship include emergent settlement of child, the exercise of parental right on behalf of the parents during the settlement period, the governing agency may, after assessing the care of parents to the child, appeal for the suspending parental right or guardianship to the court to protect the life and security of growth environment of the child. Children becomes the subjects of protection administration and the decision makers of their rights and interest are shifted from the parents to the country, and the frontline decision makers are the social makers in child protection, and the identification of social workers in parents, children and the country is often associated with the suspension of parental rights. Hence, in exercising public right, it involved in diversified and overall consideration factors and should be clarified. This study targeted at the social workers in child protection of Kaohsiung City and the method of research is document analysis, applying analysis on the file documents of the child protection cases with suspension of parental rights appealed to and granted by the courts. After the analysis, the research found that the factors considered by child protection social workers including the facts of abuse, the seriousness of abuse, the abusing parents¡¦ negligence in the repetition of abuses, non-improvement of abusing conduct, refusal in acknowledge of abuse negligence, lake of repentance, supports of relatives and friends and the reaction of children to the parents, and the factors frequently considered are the fact of abuse and the supports of relatives and friends and the reaction of children to the parents is the least. The factors considered identified from the analysis of this research may be applied to build and develop an index in suspension of parental right and will be helpful in the assessment of child protection social workers. ¡eKey words¡fChild protection, Parental rights, Children¡¦s right

Through practices of assessment and consultation, information gathering and analysis, social workers, in the field of child protection, build understandings about children and families. Social workers actively construct knowledge as they engage in assessments of children referred to them as potentially 'at risk'. Their work is always informed by explicit or implicit theories about risk and protection. The active engagement with risk by social workers is the central focus for this inquiry. This thesis presents an exploratory inquiry into the work of child protection in Aotearoa/New Zealand as experienced by social workers employed at the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS). The primary focus is on their understanding of risk and their active construction of risk discourses. I am interested in how children are identified as potentially at risk, and how risk is identified, worked with, managed and woven into the assessments of social workers as they engage in child protection work. This inquiry took, as its starting point, narratives of 70 social workers about specific child protection cases. They were asked to describe both straightforward and more complex assessments, and, as a result, provided a rich and detailed range of narratives about how risk is defined, assessed and managed by social workers. This qualitative study employed a critical incident technique as a data collection method, and applied a grounded approach to the analysis of these practice stories. The focus for the interviews was on the day-to-day work as experienced by social workers, that is, the practices of assessment in child protection. Probes were used to solicit further information when risk was discussed by the workers. This research also involved spending time in different branches of CYFS around the country and informal conversation with social workers. Field notes made during these periods of immersion in different practice settings were also analysed to provide understandings of the contexts in which social workers engage in individual and collective knowledge production about children and risk. This is the first detailed investigation of how New Zealand statutory social workers of different ethnicities engage with, and draw on, risk discourses in their assessment work. For the social workers in this study, risk discourses were actively and strategically used in the legitimation of their practice interventions. The practices of socially constructing knowledge about 'risk' are a continuing focus of this thesis, and the wider implications for social work practices of 'risk' assessment are discussed.