Moving from risk to Safety ● 75child welfare context has been in the signs of safety approach (Turnell and
Edwards 1999). This approach is an example of a different way of working
with risk and safety ideas, a way that may contribute to a more humane
child protection practice. Turnell and Edwards (1999) developed the signs of
safety approach in a collaborative endeavor with 150 frontline social work-
ers in Western Australia in the 1990s. This collaboration arose out of shared
concern that traditional risk assessment tools imposed definitions on parents
and children that constructed them as risky and problem-laden. These tools
provided little guidance on how risks could be prevented or lowered and
how safety could be increased. There was scant attention within these mod-
els to how parents and children could be engaged in collaborative partner-
ships with workers. The signs of safety approach has been implemented
across numerous jurisdictions in the United States, Canada, the United
Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand,
and Japan (Department for Child Protection 2011). Proponents argue that
when practitioners are encouraged to focus too narrowly on assessing risk,
this leads to risk-averse approaches in which families are related to with a
view to controlling them rather than collaborating with them. This leaves
little room for workers and families to work together to overcome difficulties
and to recognize opportunities to overcome challenges to family well-being
(Parton 2000; Turnell 2004). Practice that focuses on the assessment of tra-
ditional expert-defined risks and factors that are statistically associated with
risk (including physical and mental health issues, past or present experiences
of violence, drug and alcohol abuse, or poverty) needs balance, if workers
are to avoid the trap of deficit-focused practice, where the “darkest valleys
and gloomiest hollows of family life” are the primary focus (Keddell 2014;
Turnell and Edwards 1999, 101).
The signs of safety approach is an approach that combines attention to
risk management, building safety, and creating collaborative relationships. It
is premised on the question, “How can child protection professionals actually
build partnerships with parents where there is suspected or substantiated child
abuse or neglect?” (Turnell and Edwards 1999, 2, also quoted in Keddell
2014, 71). The approach is grounded in humanistic and strengths-based
philosophies that promote the importance of listening to clients’ perspectives
on their own lives and respecting clients as “people worth doing business
with” (Turnell and Edwards 1999, 42, also quoted in Keddell 2014, 71).
Rather than psychoanalyzing personal troubles as if they are intrinsic to indi-
viduals, the signs of safety approach adopts a social constructionist perspective
that contends that language constructs reality rather than that reality is able to
be objectively ascertained. From a constructionist perspective, it is essential
to invite and involve clients in narrating and making meaning of their social