The Unheld Child: Social Work, Social Distancing and the Possibilities and Limits to Child Protection during the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Unheld Child: Social Work, Social Distancing and the Possibilities and Limits to Child Protection during the COVID-19 Pandemic
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DOI：
10.1093/bjsw/bcac055
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发表时间：
2022-03-18
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Kelly, Laura
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ferguson, Harry;Pink, Sarah;Kelly, Laura
最近，在英国，6岁的阿瑟·拉宾乔·休斯和16个月大的斯塔·霍布森在COVID-19的第一阶段不幸死亡，这引发了人们对社会工作者为什么不保护他们的质疑。由于大流行而引入的社会距离破坏了社会工作者使用游戏，谈话和触摸来了解儿童经历的方式，我们在本文中报道的研究探讨了社会工作者如何能够保证儿童的安全并帮助远程家庭？我们跟踪了48名社会工作人员在疫情爆发前9个月的工作，发现他们在视频通话和户外活动中看到儿童的做法很有创意，有些人确实与儿童进行了身体接触。然而，他们的工作受到重大限制。高度的焦虑和对感染的恐惧使他们很难思考清楚，很难在家访时集中注意力照顾孩子，也很难玩耍甚至触摸玩具。在家工作而不是在办公室工作，切断了他们获得同伴和上级支持的重要渠道。更好地了解这些限制对于在大流行的剩余时间和之后确保儿童的安全至关重要。2019冠状病毒病大流行极大地改变了社会工作者与儿童和家庭接触的方式。本文介绍了我们对COVID-19在大流行的前九个月对英格兰社会工作和儿童保护的影响的研究结果。我们的目标是提供新的知识，使社会工作者能够实现现实的期望，特别是对儿童保护的限制。这种观点比以往任何时候都更加重要，因为我们了解到，尽管在大流行病期间有社会工作参与，但仍有儿童不幸死于虐待。我们的研究结果显示，一些从业者是如何在身体上接近一些孩子，而与其他孩子保持距离的。我们研究了形成亲密和距离的动力，并确定了对儿童保护和“无人看管的儿童”问题造成限制的七种影响。本文提供了对儿童保护作为一种具身的、多感官的实践的新理解，以及身体自我异化的焦虑和体验如何限制了从业者思考和接近儿童的能力。虽然社会工作者创造性地即兴发挥以实现他们的目标，但冠状病毒和社交距离对儿童保护施加了限制，这是任何创新实践都无法克服的。
The recent tragic deaths in England of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and sixteen-month-old Star Hobson during the first phase of COVID-19 have raised questions about why social workers did not protect them. The introduction of social distancing due to the pandemic disrupted the ways social workers used play, talk and touch to understand children's experiences and the research we report on in this article explored how able were social workers to keep children safe and help families from a distance? We followed the work of forty-eight social work staff over the first nine months of the pandemic and found that they were creative in seeing children on video calls and outdoors, and some did get physically close to children. There were, however, significant constraints on their work. High levels of anxiety and fear of infection made it hard for them to think straight and stay focused on children on home visits, to play or even touch toys. Working from home rather than in the office cut them off from vital sources of peer and supervisory support. Better understanding of these limits will be crucial to keeping children safe for the remainder of the pandemic and beyond it.The COVID-19 pandemic changed dramatically the ways social workers engaged with children and families. This article presents findings from our research into the effects of COVID-19 on social work and child protection in England during the first nine months of the pandemic. Our aim is to provide new knowledge to enable realistic expectations of what it was possible for social workers to achieve and particularly the limits to child protection. Such perspective has become more important than ever due to knowledge of children who died tragically from abuse despite social work involvement during the pandemic. Our research findings show how some practitioners got physically close to some children, whilst being distanced from others. We examine the dynamics that shaped closeness and distance and identify seven influences that created limits to child protection and the problem of 'the unheld child'. The article provides new understandings of child protection as embodied, multi-sensorial practices and the ways anxiety and experiences of bodily self-alienation limit practitioners' capacities to think about and get close to children. Whilst social workers creatively improvised to achieve their goals, coronavirus and social distancing imposed limits to child protection that no amount of innovative practice could overcome in all cases.