Errors and Mistakes in Child Protection: Understandings and Responsibilities

This chapter provides an overview and discussion of some key concepts and issues in the book. It discusses different definitions of errors and mistakes and the most common approaches (including the plague approach; the person approach, the legal approach and the systems approach) together with the challenges of trying to avoid errors and mistakes in child protection and deal with them. It demonstrates that there is no universally agreed definition of error and mistakes in child protection and that child protection fatalities are often seen as the result of errors and mistakes. The chapter discusses a central question in child protection which concerns the responsibility for errors and mistakes, how such responsibility is distributed and avoided, and how power relations both reflect and feed into such processes. It argues that these are key characteristics of and challenges for policy and practice in child protection.