Discourses, Approaches and Strategies on Errors And Mistakes in Child Protection in Germany

Scandals have been part of child protection history in Germany for more than 100 years and it can be shown that they have been driving forces for legislation and concept development on several occasions. Scientific methods for analysing unexpected and unintended negative case outcomes in child protection have entered the field only recently and several approaches to case analysis have been developed. Due to a strong tradition of counterfactual thinking in penal law and ‘Fallverstehan’ in social work most approaches are not informed by empirical research on child protection outcomes. Proceduralisation and resource expansion have been the main responses to public inquiries on errors and mistakes in child protection in Germany which are still non-mandatory. Currently the role of ‘serious case reviews’ in German child protection policy is open for debate and it is argued they offer only limited and conditional value for creating a better child protection system.