Protection Of Children And Vulnerable Adults – Current Practices And Policies In Ireland

Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults

Aim

Discuss about the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults.

Child protection has become one of the key issues in the globalized world, where every welfare organization is thoughtful about their rights, care and development (Harding 2014). As every society has its own way to care for children, due to their religion, economic status, socio economic culture and political context, states also create legislations and protection rights with respect to those norms of society that maximized the risk of children being abused or misused. These risk factors includes, breakdown of extended family system, traditional norms and poverty that affects children emotionally as well as mentally and risks their growth and development (Sugiyama et al. 2012). The United Nations International Children Education Fund or UNICEF works in over 130 countries to protect and provide these children their basic fundamental rights and the organization is determined to change the shift of society from abusive to protective for these children (UNICEF 2014). The purpose of this assignment is to point out different current practices of Ireland regarding childcare protection and safety. Further, the assignment will focus on the risk assessment procedures and will discuss the reporting procedure and issues regarding interagency working in this topic. The risk assessment, risk management framework will be depending on a coherent multiagency concept, which will be presented in this assignment.

The prime aim of this assignment is to analyze different policies and practices of Ireland related to childcare critically. Furthermore, it will aim to point out the loopholes in the child protection policies and conduct a risk assessment.

The first childcare act was proposed in the Irish assembly back in 1996. This act was empowering for children as it had a clause related to juvenile justice and according to that, the physicians had the power to approve or reject any children who is physically or mentally for fit for such punishments, given by juvenile court (Child Protection Guidelines 2017).  However, in 2011, the Irish government launched a guideline namely the Children Fist Guidelines (2011) that claims to protect children for physical and mental abuse as well as neglect. To understand the effectiveness of this act Devaney and McGregor (2016) conducted a retrospective review that aimed to identify the lags in the program, training of the volunteers and its future implication. The researchers conducted interviews and surveys to understand the competency level of the workers involved in this childcare policy and have attended the training program provided by the Irish government to implement the Children first act successfully. For quantitative analysis, 112 participants of CF guidelines trainees were provided a questionnaire and were asked about the process, its loopholes and future implications according to them. After the competition of the analysis it was found that maximum of the respondents thought that the policy was able to protect children’s rights in every aspect and the Irish government was able to spread awareness in the society about the policy. However, 13% respondents believes that maximum of the trainees have joined this social work as their profession that may harm the noble step in future (Devaney and McGregor 2016).

Critical issues in child care practices

Furthermore, there are several other acts, proposed by the Irish government to protect the right of education, safety, nutrition and mental health of children. Hence, the acts such as Freedom of Information, 1997; protection for person reporting child abuse, the education act 1998, domestic violence act 1996 has been proposed by the government. Within these, the domestic violence act for childcare bears huge importance as the number of crimes against children has been increased tremendously. It provides the health bodies with the ability to interfere in the violent situation and save the children and his family from violence. However Featherstone, Morris and White (2013) thinks that there is not much discussion about this section of child protection and therefore, the government should focus on this section of child care act as increasing inequality, mental illness and increasing diversity in the society has stopped people to discuss such issues publically. Hence, the government should focus on ideas to resume such dialogue in the society to spread the awareness about violence against children. Further, the review conducted by these researchers indicated to the fact that the government should focus on improved family practices as it helps in maintaining and sustaining love connection and support that ultimately helps to protect the children of that family (Featherstone, Morris and White 2013).

According to the child protection and healthcare of Ireland, there are four segments of children abuse such as emotional abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse and neglect and reporting of children abuse reports are done according to these four sections (Health Service Executive Ireland 2012). Therefore, according to the government of Ireland, it is the responsibility of the each individual in the country to report against any unusual practice, which is against the mandate of the children first act 2011. The reporting procedure. There are different reporting guidelines for government and non-government organizations for reporting against the individual or practices abusing children in the society (TUSLA 2018). If the reporting is done in the Health and Safety Executive office of Ireland (HSE), then the HSE officer is responsible to provide protection to the person reporting such incidence and take appropriate decision regarding child protection and welfare. However, anonymous and malicious referrals are also covered under the children first act and according to it, there is a provision in the act referring to the protection of person reporting the child abuse act 1998, which mentions if the person reporting child abuse proven guilty of reporting false news, then he will be punished (Health Service Executive Ireland 2012).

Reporting procedures in child protection

After the reporting of the children abuse, the parents of the child have to undergo two lawful procedures such as screening and preliminary enquiry. The social worker, assessing the child abusive case is free to interrogate the parents or respective individuals and if the person needs any outside support, the government helps the social worker with that (TUSLA 2018). Finally, after the preliminary assessment, the case is referred as child abusive case or a welfare case. After the reporting procedure, it is the responsibility of the social workers to take care of the child’s safety and developmental needs, to assess the parent’s capacity to meet their children’s nutrition and educational needs and research about the environmental or social factors affecting child’s mental or physical health (Health Service Executive Ireland 2012).

According to the governmental analysis, the reporting procedure has led the social workers to investigate and report a wide array of crimes against children. However, critics believe that mandating the reporting procedure created a big loophole in the practice. According to (), the child protection unit working under the children first act 2011, determines that their agency determines their entire resources on investigation and reporting. However, it was found that only 5 to 10 percent of workers invests their time in investigation with respect to other functions such as providing care and support to children. Hence the agency most of the time, fails to detect the criminal involved in such crime.

As the previous section determines that, the Irish government is keen to implement the children first act through government well as private organizations so that the entire society can be involved in the process of child protection and child development (Child Protection Guidelines 2017). To fulfil this objective organizations such as public and private schools, service and agencies are being encouraged by the government so that they can contribute in this cause and volunteer their employees as social workers who will be reporting and interrogating such incidents in their locality. However, there are several issues or challenges regarding working in such multi-agency or interagency working, that affects the primary objective of this project (Davidson et al. 2012). The primary concern is regarding the funding process as multiple agencies involves in conflicts due to funding issues from the government and leads to delay in training and development needs as well as service delay. Secondly, sometimes it is difficult for organizations such as healthcare settings and schools to transform their working environment and work for different context (Coates 2017). Furthermore, after completing their conventional works, there are very limited amount of these employees can provide to the childcare program. Several other issues increases the limitations that are communication gap and lack of clarity from the higher authority on the roles and responsibility. Finally, the denial from employees of different public and private employees on working 24X7 on the project can be limiting, as additional stress and responsibilities are imposed on the employees without any pay or increment. Furthermore, these multiagency workers lack coherent aim, team spirit and joint interventions due to which the duplication of services occurs (Hood 2014).

Issues related to interagency working

However, there are certain ways described by different researchers that can be implemented by the government authorities to make these negative assessments in to positive ones. The organizations should focus on sharing important informations and the government should publish government circulations so that every organization attached with such cause can be informed about the aims and objectives equally.  Further, the government should focus on improving the skills of the employees registered as social workers by providing them training so that they are aware of the flow of their process and document each process according to the policy (Davidson et al. 2012).

The global society as well as the Ireland government is shifting the child protection assessment from clinical decision making to standardized assessment tools. Hence, there is a debate amongst researchers regarding the effectiveness of these tools (Skivenes and Stenberg 2015). Therefore, it is important to understand these two risk-assessment processes used in child protection programs. The actuarial assessment tool is used different statistical analysis to understand the patter of child abuse in the society and after that the practitioners provide the assessment report to the parents and with respect to that score, further decisions are made (Neal and Grisso 2014). On the other hand, the consensus based assessment tool utilizes different child abusive literatures and derives different opinions of expert practitioners. Therefore, using these literatures and opinions the process is able to bridge the gap between the clinical and actuarial decision-making processes (Duru et al. 2013). Further, after collecting all these data, the practitioner provides individual risk score and as per the consensus based approach, the practitioner possess the independence to provide a risk score to the patient depending on his or her personal intuition (Coohey et al. 2013).

However, both these risk assessment procedures possess their strengths and weaknesses that lead to success or limitations to the process. The strengths of actuarial assessment tool is that it focuses on limited aspects that led it to focus on important factor and provide precise estimate regarding child abuse. However, by doing so, it fails to focus on unique and unusual contexts that needs complex assessment tools such as consensus based assessment tool for identification. On the other hand, the consensus-based assessment provides a flexible approach to the assessment process and conducts a comprehensive assessment of risk. However, the risk indicators in this process are poorly conceptualize as completely dependent on personal assessment of researchers. Further, the process uses the same variable to detect and predict different cases of children abuse whereas as per Annerbäck et al. (2012), different cases of child abuse has different indicators. Hence, these ambiguous risk indicators diverts the aim of the child protection program and leads to decrease the effect of the process.

Conclusion

As the UNICEF has declared children as the most vulnerable society in the world, nations have focused their policies and norms to protect the rights of these children. There are different ways through which these children are being abused and hence UNICEF has focused their work in 130 countries to protect the rights of those children. Ireland is also suffering from child abusive cases and therefore the government launched the children first guidelines in 2011. The assignment provides critics of the childcare guidelines of Ireland according to which, the children first guidelines lacked several aspects such as the government should focus on resuming the dialogue over this social taboo. Furthermore, the assignment provided the reporting procedures of child abuses, discussed the shortcoming of working in multi-agency workforce, and provided few interventions that can be applied by the government so that this interagency workforce can work as a team against such major concern of society, children abuse. Finally, the assignment discussed the risk assessment process and provided the strengths and weaknesses of the process

References

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Child Protection Guidelines 2017. Child Protection Guidelines – Department of Children and Youth Affairs – Ireland. [online] Dcya.gov.ie. Available at: https://www.dcya.gov.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/child_welfare_protection/childfirst.htm [Accessed 17 Feb. 2018].

Coates, D., 2017. Working with families with parental mental health and/or drug and alcohol issues where there are child protection concerns: inter?agency collaboration. Child & Family Social Work, 22(S4), pp.1-10.

Coohey, C., Johnson, K., Renner, L.M. and Easton, S.D., 2013. Actuarial risk assessment in child protective services: Construction methodology and performance criteria. Children and Youth Services Review, 35(1), pp.151-161.

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Harding, L.F., 2014. Perspectives in child care policy, 2^nd Edn, pp. 123-145, Routledge.

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Hood, R., 2014. Complexity and integrated working in children’s services. The British Journal of Social Work, 44(1), pp.27-43.

Neal, T.M. and Grisso, T., 2014. Assessment practices and expert judgment methods in forensic psychology and psychiatry: An international snapshot. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 41(12), pp.1406-1421.

Skivenes, M. and Stenberg, H., 2015. Risk assessment and domestic violence–how do child welfare workers in three countries assess and substantiate the risk level of a 5?year?old girl?. Child & Family Social Work, 20(4), pp.424-436.

Sugiyama, T., Okely, A.D., Masters, J.M. and Moore, G.T., 2012. Attributes of child care centers and outdoor play areas associated with preschoolers’ physical activity and sedentary behavior. Environment and Behavior, 44(3), pp.334-349.

TUSLA 2018. How do I make a mandated report to Tusla? | Tusla – Child and Family Agency. [online] Tusla.ie. Available at: https://www.tusla.ie/children-first/mandated-persons/making-a-mandated-report [Accessed 17 Feb. 2018].

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