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The statutory child protection system (SCP) in Western countries including Australia has been characterised by neoliberal values and practices in the last several decades. This has led to SCP being punitive and blaming of parents in poverty, offering little in the way of meaningful and substantial family support to assist parents to address problems in their care of their children and damaging to children and young people who are often precipitously removed and lose contact with their kin.
This paper explores the way neoliberal approaches have often co-opted social work which has been unable to develop a more emancipatory approach to working with children and families in severe crisis in the formal child protection system. The paper calls for critical social work values and knowledge to be adopted and promoted as part of the mandate of statutory child protection.
Introduction
In Australia and many other Western countries, statutory child protection (SCP) services have struggled to cope in the last two decades with a sustained rise in the numbers of children and young people entering and remaining in the system (Kojan and Lonne 2012: 96). At the same time, political and economic systems in Australia and elsewhere have been characterised by the rise of neoliberalism. Social work as a professional project arose out of the social democratic milieu of the 1970s and 1980s. While its role in the SCP system has endured under recent neoliberal understandings, social work's knowledge, skills and values have often been sidelined. This paper focuses on the SCP system as a field of practice. It draws on recent literature to analyse issues. Critical social work with its understanding of power and disadvantage is identified as the way forward in statutory child protection work.
Understanding Neoliberalism
Like many other countries, Australia has embraced neoliberalism. This philosophy, promoted by conservative economists, arose in opposition to the post-World War II expansion of more collective public provision for citizens in Western democracies. According to Manne (2014-15: 64), neoliberalism had totally displaced the Keynesian social democratic model by the 1980s. The gap between income groups has grown wider with Oxfam International (2016: 2) identifying that today, the wealthiest 62 people in the world own as much as the poorest 3.6 billion (half of the world's population)....