Child protection social work in times of uncertainty: dilemmas of personal and professional ethics

This chapter outlines some of the tensions that social workers who work in a child protection context face on a day to day basis. The chapter argues that social workers have a duty to use their knowledge and skills to challenge systems that fail to recognise their professional autonomy. Social workers in this context must consider the moral aspects of their role and be prepared at times to resist the demands made upon them if these demands are believed to be incompatible with the moral and ethical stance of themselves as professionals and as individuals. The chapter uses a case study to highlight particular problems and the implications for the social worker on both a professional and personal level. The authors make the case for a shift in social work education that puts ethics, role, resistance and responsibility at its core and relegates procedure, competencies, procedure and codified ways of being to the margins of the social work learning experience.