By Samantha Halil,
London Metropolitan University.
The Children Act (1989) is a long-standing piece of legislation that defines significant harm into categories of child abuse or neglect. This was built upon the concept of harm occurring inside the home, predominantly from parents/caregivers. In modern society, the four categories of harm, thus being physical, emotional and sexual abuse and neglect, remain unchanged, with a strong focus on parental capacity. However, with advancements in social media and contextual safeguarding cases on the rise across the UK, no category of abuse or neglect currently fits the concept of extra-familial harm and limited primary research has been carried out with social work professionals to explore whether the current categories of child protection, are relevant to extra-familial harm. This research paper aims to build upon research undertaken by Firmin (2022) and address the gap in legislation whereby extrafamilial harm is not listed as a category of abuse, and to explore with social work professionals through the method of structured interviews and thematic analysis, whether there is a need for a reform of current legislation. The paper provides a detailed analysis of how extra-familial harm is an emerging risk making up a large proportion of the social work caseload with child criminal and sexual exploitation being the main child protection issues faced by teenagers outside of the family home. Professionals also felt that there were strong links between looked after children (LAC) and further exposure to extrafamilial harm, and that the response of placing a child under local authority care, is rarely a solution to tackles cases of contextual safeguarding. Furthermore, workers felt that the category of neglect was widely used as a catch all category due to there being no relevant category for cases of extra-familial harm. The paper also provided an insight into the powerful emotions felt by parents whose children were placed into the category of neglect and felt judgement of a ‘failure to protect’. The overarching themes arising from the research paper, draws upon a need to establish amendments to current legislation, to reflect upon the changed risk profile of more risk coming from outside of the family home
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13866897