چالش های برای عمل و آگاهی در مددکاری اجتماعی بهزیستی کودکان: از "اجتماعی" تا "اطلاعاتی؟

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of an important debate about whether and how far social work practice with children and families is being dominated by a relatively narrow and often legalistic focus on child protection, at the cost of the broader concern with ensuring the welfare of children. Family support is often the operative word used to address the child welfare focus but scholars in the field still wonder whether our new technologically based systems can accommodate broader concerns. Perhaps the centrality of procedures has overshadowed what social work practitioners used to value as good judgment, including a laborious weighing of facts and practice wisdom. This paper discusses the possible impact of new information and communication technology systems. It reflects on the shift from a narrative to a database way of thinking and operating and discusses how the ‘social’ may be being overshadowed by the ‘informational.’ In doing so it attempts to identify a number of key challenges for both practice and knowledge which need to be considered in the future.

The last 20 years have witnessed a growing cacophony of heated debate about the most appropriate policy paradigm for thinking about and delivering children's services. While this is a major focus of debate in the ‘Anglophone’ world of North America, the United Kingdom and Australasia (Lonne, Parton, Thomson, & Harries, 2009), it has also become an increasing issue in other parts of Western (Gilbert, 1997) and Eastern Europe (Lewis et al., 2004). In particular, it has been argued that the child protection paradigm which had become so dominant from the 1980s onwards is no longer adequate and that wider issues concerning children's welfare and well-being were being ignored. It has been argued that a major paradigm shift is required which takes these issues seriously (Lindsey & Shlonsky, 2008). As a result, a number of jurisdictions are introducing new systems which attempt a more differentiated and integrated approach (Waldfogel, 2008). While in considerable sympathy with these developments, I am also concerned that the energy and time these debates have taken up may have deflected us from engaging with another major issue of growing importance and centrality: the nature and impact of Information Communication Technology (ICT) on day-to-day policy and practice. In fact, it could be argued that the more wide-ranging, complex and integrated children's services have become the more reliance has been placed on new systems of ICT. Rarely have these developments been subject to critical appraisal. This is the purpose of this paper. A central part of my argument is that the nature of practice and the knowledge which both informs and characterises it is less concerned with the relational and social dimensions of the work and more with the informational. Increasingly it seems that the key focus of activity of child welfare agencies is concerned with the gathering, sharing, and monitoring of information about the individuals with whom they come into direct and indirect contact, together with accounting for their own decisions and interventions, and those of the other professionals and agencies with whom they work. It is not my argument that these are new activities but that they have taken on a much greater significance in recent years because of the growing importance of ICTs and that the pace of change is dramatic. My purpose is to consider how this growing concern with information might be transforming the form of knowledge in social work and the nature of ‘social’ work itself. While my interest in these issues has been prompted by a series of important changes in child welfare policy and practice in England, similar changes are clearly taking place in other countries, including the USA.