Moving from risk to Safety ● 69Most human service workers probably think this way, whether or not they
consciously connect it to this particular sociological theory. The sociological
imagination reminds us that it is important to identify underlying political
and other ideologies attached to risk concepts, as doing so enables human
service workers to connect their own microlevel practice with the political
context in which they are operating. In this way, the sociological imagination
leads to an awareness of the dominant discourses governing practice settings.
Featherstone, Broadhurst, and Holt (2012, 619) noted that “models of practice
do not emerge or exist in a vacuum; they are intricately linked to political,
economic and social projects... [and]... need to be understood within
the wider social and economic rationalities of that project.” They went on
to argue that many types of risk assessment reflect an increasingly neoliberal
individualization of social problems, attributing risk to solely individual
factors (such as a history of abuse) without recognizing the contributing influ-
ences of social contexts or structural disadvantage. Despite their shortcomings,
such approaches are attractive, because they seem to promise certainty and a
“scientific” method to arrive at a correct solution, especially as the perception
of risk is heightened when practitioners are working with children, who are
themselves constructed as fragile, passive, and in need of rescuing. As shall be
seen, the public spotlight in which human service workers work contributes
to this search for surety.
Risk as Ubiquitous
When a tragedy occurs in practice, such as the death of a child known to social
services, the public and political condemnation of social work tends to be swift
and unforgiving. Alaszewski and Burgess (2007) argued that events such as
this, and the public reactions that follow them, have led to the emergence of
a precautionary and defensive approach to risk. This influences the available
discourses used to construct risk in social dialogue of all kinds. Taking a pre-
cautionary approach to risk management disregards the actual probabilities of
particular events occurring and “casts the future principally in negative, poten-
tially catastrophic terms” (Alaszewski and Burgess 2007, 349). Beck (1992)
argued similarly in his “risk society” thesis that people have become more
aware of risks and have simultaneously internalized the belief that they alone
are responsible for risk management. This is part of the evolution of reflexive
modernity, wherein people are more likely to recast themselves as autonomous
agents. This leads to a paradoxical perception that risks are all-encompassing
and yet able to be controlled by the individual (Beck 1992; Gillingham 2006).
Human service practice is influenced by this thinking, as the implicit belief
is that risk is pervasive yet controllable. Individuals, both clients and human