The recent history of child protection in Scotland and the impact of intra-familiar child abuse inquiries such as orkney on today's child protection work

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Master's Thesis from the year 2000 in the subject Social Pedagogy / Social Work, Glasgow Caledonian University, language: English, abstract: In November 1999 the Sunday Mail ran a story Orkney in new kid-sex scandal. Within the article, the social workers at Orkney were accused of doing nothing because the mother thought that the Orkney inquiry in 1992 damaged them so much they were happier pretending this was not happening. Furthermore, an 'unnamed insider' stated "it's true that sex abuse allegations are handled with kid gloves within the department. It's only natural after what happened here before." The purpose of this study is to explore the recent history of child protection in Scotland and the impact of intra-familiar child abuse inquiries on today's child protection work. The main question hereby is: Are children more at risk? Crystallisation was used as a general research methodology to obtain a wide range of information and to increase the validity of results. The data was derived from social work sources - interviews with two senior social work managers of two local authorities in the West of Scotland as well as a child protection trainer and questionnaires presented to child protection trainers and 32 students of two West of Scotland cohorts currently undertaking a post-qualifying child protection programme. The study was carried out between February and April 2000 and examined the perceptions and attitudes of child protection workers and how recent inquiries into child abuse have influenced today's protection work and policy. It was found that there has been both a positive and a negative impact on child protection work. All agreed that the partnership approach with parents and children and the inter-agency approach are important for good practice within child protection work. However, most of the respondents felt also a negative impact of the inquiries not necessarily on practice but on the social work profession itself. Furthermore, most agreed that children are not under greater risk owing to the reluctance of social workers to believe children's...