Child Safeguarding and Social Care

Child maltreatment is a large scale issue with major short and long term health consequences for childhood and adult life. The incidence of abuse and neglect is profoundly unequal and closely related to the social determinants of health. Families’ economic, environmental and social circumstances are reflected in a steep social gradient. There are also strong but complex patterns in the proportions of children from different ethnic groups on child protection plans. Service provision is unequally distributed. In recent years policy and practice have responded to prominent cases of child deaths by an increasing focus on investigating and identifying individualised cases of risk to children. Increasingly scarce resources, because of austerity policies, have been drawn away from services aimed at prevention and family support. This has contributed to growing proportions of children being subject to child protection investigations and/or being removed from their families into care. New population based and poverty-aware approaches are pointing the way to new social models of practice which are humane, strategic, relevant to family circumstances and aim to reduce inequalities between children.