72 ● Emily Keddell and tony Stanley
In general, a child protection orientation, infused with an overreliance on
risk thinking and risk assessment tools, is likely to lead to a practice preoc-
cupied with identifying and eradicating risk and with risk-averse decision
making (Križ and Skivenes 2013). Developing a consensus on the preferred
orientation in any nation state is difficult, as there are multiple stakeholder
views. Achieving a broad national and governmental acceptance of a welfare
orientation is far from straightforward.
Risk and Values
Lying unexamined beneath the public conversations about risk, risk factor assess-
ments, and official national policy orientations, there are many other factors
that influence how risk is understood and applied to real-life decision-making
processes (Buckley 2003). These influences include societal norms, value
judgments, culturally specific beliefs about parenting, emotional responses, orga-
nizational audit cultures, and dominant theories of human behavior. These
many sources of discourse provide messy and often conflicting messages for
human service workers, and many are related to implicit and unstated value
positions. If interpreting a social situation is not just about finding out
the “truth” but also about deciding how to interpret and construct that truth,
we are dealing not with an objective judgment but one shaped by values.
Dean (1999, 31) argued that risk is “never value-free, but rather is always the
product of a way of seeing. A risk, therefore, is not a static, objective phenom-
enon, but is constantly constructed and negotiated as part of the network
of social interaction and the formation of meaning.” When social scientists
consider which discourses to employ in public sociology, or in practice in the
human services, the ethical aim is to select those discourses that support their
moral commitments to social justice, human rights, and self-determination.
When working in the field of child welfare, the scope of moral commitments
incorporates concern for the well-being of both children and adults.
Risk in Practice: Impacts on Relationships and Children
One outcome of risk thinking can be intense anxiety for human service
workers, particularly if they see their role as needing to control and resolve
“riskiness.” A focus on control can undermine the practice imperative of col-
laborating with clients—in this case, parents—as parents are too easily seen as
untrustworthy and as primarily a source of risk. This focus on parental deficits
positions parents as unequal partners in the worker-client relationship, which
does serious damage to that relationship. In addition, the worker’s fear of
being blamed if something goes wrong leads to risk-averse decision making,