The complexities of caring for child protection workers: The contexts of practice and supervision

This paper focuses on the challenges and complexities of caring for front-line child protection workers. It is organised in four main sections. After a brief explanation of the background, the paper reviews the silencing of children as a form of defensive denial. The second section presents research on the problems faced by child protection workers and the defences used in response to actual and threatened violence. The third section reflects on the resulting complexities of supervision in the face of organisational defensiveness. In the final section, examples of good staff support from outside social work are summarised. The paper draws on theoretical material and the primary author’s experiences of undertaking research in a range of organisations.