It “helped keep me sane – when the world is turned upside down”: Parents’ experiences of support during a child protection investigation

Campbell, Harriet

Abstract

Background: Child protection systems exist around the world to safeguard children from harm. These systems inevitably involve participation from parents, with parents often being the focus of safeguarding interventions aimed at protecting children. Research has illustrated that parents experience involvement in child protection as distressing and often traumatic, and that supporting parents can improve engagement in social work processes, leading to better working relationships and outcomes for children, and the whole family.

Aims: The present study approaches the subject for the first time from a counselling psychology perspective, and explores parents’ subjective experiences of support during a child protection investigation. It aims to identify parents’ sources of support, including if parents considered counselling or therapy and why, to generate implications for practice for clinicians working with this population, and other health and social care professionals, in order to help improve child safeguarding and welfare.

Methods: Qualitative data was collected from twenty parents who had experienced a child protection investigation which had now ended. Participants completed an online survey, with six parents participating in follow up interviews over Skype and email. A reflexive thematic analysis was conducted of the data.

Findings: Under the overarching theme ‘Child protection investigations are a personal attack’, three main themes were developed. The first theme: ‘Whose side are you on?’, explores parents’ views of the divisive nature of child protection investigations, often splitting parents and social workers into two ‘sides’. The second theme: ‘Keeping it in versus letting it out’, captures parents’ ambivalence in seeking external support and the final theme ‘The aftermath: “We will spend our lives trying to recover”, acknowledges parents’ experiences of the long-lasting impact and need for continual processing after the investigation ends.

Conclusion: These findings have implications for both social work and therapeutic practice. Firstly, parents may benefit from talking therapy, and this study considers the advantages and barriers for parents in engaging with this support, and what clinicians may need to be mindful of during therapeutic practice. Secondly, parents’ experiences of strong emotions and divisive dynamics elicited in child protection often creates an adversarial dyad that can arguably lose focus of the child. Counselling psychologists and other professionals, such as advocates, peer support and therapists, can act as an important ‘third position’ in mediating and providing a space to think, potentially improving parent and child experiences of child protection. Thirdly, this study highlights that different forms of support might be beneficial at different times to parents, with there often being a need for support after child protection processes, which could be provided by counselling psychologists. This study contributes new knowledge to this area by highlighting parents’ voices on what support they most needed when their world was “turned upside down” , and suggests that counselling psychology can play a part in improving the current child protection system in the UK, enabling more children and families to be supported.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Dec 17, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: May 31, 2022
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/8268499
• Award Date: May 31, 2022