Despite its huge public profile, surprisingly little is known about child protection work. Discussion focuses on failures that result in children dying, or on what social workers cannot do, due to bureaucratic pressures and limited time. This book examines in detail how social workers can use the time they do have to relate to children and families, make child protection work and create meaningful change.

Featuring:

• Detailed examination of real-world child protection work and family experiences based on original research;

• A new vocabulary for understanding and improving social work and relationship-based practice;

• New insights into how to provide effective staff support and supervision;

• Original integration of psychoanalytic and sociological perspectives; and

• Practical tools for navigating challenges such as working with infants and managing hostile relationships.

Sure to become a classic social work text, this book explores how helpful relationships are made and sustained, and how they can be made better. It provides a new ‘forward-facing’ approach, with practical and theoretical insights into how, and under what organisational conditions, relationship-based practice and child protection can be made to work.