Experiences from the front-line : implications for a critical child protection practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical social work theories have taken a prominent place in Canadian social work curriculums and academic social work literature in recent years. The prevalence of critical social work theory is understandable considering that the content of critical theories can help social workers grapple with how to carry out a practice that is centrally concerned with social justice. However, critical social work theories have generally been presented abstractly, with little attention placed upon the particular contexts of social work practice. As a result, not much is known about how critical social work theory is actually applied in practice. This is especially important in the context of child protection, where issues of oppression and power are particularly acute. This thesis is premised on the assumption that an understanding of the context of child protection work is necessary in order to develop a critical social work theory that is applicable to this field. The thesis examines the context of child protection practice by exploring the subjective experiences of 14 front-line child protection workers. Drawing on in-depth interviews that focus on day-to-day practice, this thesis suggests that child protection work involves dealing with a range of fears that influence workers' practice, including their fears about children being harmed and about their own physical and professional vulnerability. As well, child protection workers presented a picture of the ways that their legislative and organizational context shaped their work. These factors of child protection appeared to influence a practice in which relationships and interventions with clients were focused on monitoring parents' completion of a series of tasks and children were constructed as vulnerable, individual, and rights-bearing. Ideas for a critical child protection practice are offered, based on these results. In particular, a critical child protection practice that includes the adoption of more detailed attention to the internal worlds of parents, child-care workers and children is discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".