TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2017//
TI  - Social workers and independent experts in child protection decision making: messages from an intercountry comparative study
JO  - British journal of social work
A1  - Dickens, Jonathan
A1  - Berrick, Jill
A1  - Pösö, Tarja
A1  - Skivenes, Marit
SP  - 1024
EP  - 1042
VL  - 47
IS  - 4
N2  - This paper draws on an international comparative study of social work decision making in cases that are on the edge of care order proceedings, involving child protection workers from Finland, Norway, England and the USA (California). It focuses on workers’ responses in an online questionnaire to questions about the use of independent experts to inform their decisions about whether or not to take a case to court. All the countries try to avoid taking cases to court if possible, but the ways they do this vary considerably. The findings show the different meanings and implications that the request for an independent assessment has in the different systems. Workers’ views reflect the roles and tasks that independent experts have in the different countries; and these in turn reflect their distinctive child protection systems and wider child welfare approaches. The paper offers a starting point for reflection about one’s own system, and suggests that the well-known distinction between family support and child protection models should not be seen as a simple binary categorisation, but rather as a complex, contingent and contested continuum.    Child protection, cross-national research, decision making, expertise, social work and law<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 0045-3102
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcw064
ID  - ref1
ER  -