Different Voices on the Child Protection Process

Abstract

International social work has many manifestations. These reflect the diversity of contexts and roles in which social workers practice. The profession, whether on the frontline, in the classroom, within the page or among policy dialogue is increasingly aware of a responsibility to ensure that a multiplicity of actors are given voice and lend their perspective to informing what it does. Within this picture, and sometimes all too often, the perception of a social worker remains as someone who is primarily involved in the protection of children. This edition of the journal seeks to fuse these two considerations. In doing so it brings together a set of different voices on the child protection process: children, women, practitioners, students and supervisors. Taken together we have four qualitative articles that provide a rich spectrum take on this most common of social work subjects. It further supports the journal’s own direction of travel of seeking more articles led and written by authors from a diversity of practice backgrounds, as well as from any academic orientation. We have, for example, recently published articles for example from Australia, China, Czech Republic and Northern Ireland, many of these exploring the global complexities of international social work. Our exploration in this issue begins with Katelynn Buchner, Tammy Pearson and Susan Burke’s rich qualitative exploration of five Canadian Indigenous women’s voices regarding their experience of contact with child welfare services at the birth of their child. The authors, led by a thesis student turned practicing social worker, had the explicit aim in their research of providing Indigenous mothers with the opportunity to voice their experiences. As a consequence, the article provides a myriad of challenging messages from the women to the profession. These include experiences of a range of very powerful emotions and many threads of feeling judged and stigmatised within a structurally oppressive system of huge power imbalances. What comes across very strongly is their capacity to be caring mothers despite the challenges of