76 ● Emily Keddell and tony Stanley
experiences. In doing so, clients are enabled to reconsider their current
circumstances and give voice to new visions for new pathways; this can
engage them in committing to and co-constructing behavioral change (Berg
and Kelly 2000; de Shazer 1991).
The signs of safety assessment process does not ignore difficulties and
problems faced by families, but rather than constructing these as risks, the
difficulties are approached as concerns and worries for the future. Workers and
families together consider these concerns and worries alongside aspects that
could be drawn on to build safety, such as a family’s opportunities, resources,
and strengths. Included among such strengths are safety behaviors that may
have been engaged in previously or that may be in evidence now and that
support the safety and well-being of children. In keeping with its solution-
focused and strengths-based orientation, the signs of safety approach encour-
ages workers to help clients identify exceptions to harmful behavior, that is,
times when abusive behavior could have happened but did not. The human
service worker explores what was different during the nonabusive periods;
this opens up a resource to be worked with. The approach also, however,
states the “bottom-line concerns” of the social worker and the social work
agency, that is, those concerns that must be addressed in order for the case to
be closed (Keddell 2014, 72).
Signs of Safety in Practice
The signs of safety approach to child welfare is premised on working with
families in a respectful, open, and honest way. It helps the worker to be clear
with the family about what is concerning and what needs to change. There
are three underlying principles to this approach. The first is that the human
service worker engages with the family in a way that helps the family to be
clear about why the work is necessary. This leads to the second principle—
that the family locates their own resources that could help to resolve the prob-
lem at hand. Third, the family and the worker together develop a safety plan
that clearly spells out to everyone involved what needs to happen so that child
safety is achieved. This is a significant shift away from monitoring families
and referring them to other services, toward instead a collaborative approach
whereby the family members are clear about what needs to change, when,
and why. The family is positioned as central to bringing about enough change
to the children’s lives so that the worker can be assured that no further harm
will come to them, thus collaboration and investment by the family is more
likely (Keddell 2014). A meaningful care plan is developed with the family,
and a signs of safety mapping and scaling tool is used regularly to show the
direction of change—either getting better or getting worse. Practice informed