78 ● Emily Keddell and tony Stanley
in protecting and improving the baby’s experience, once they are helped to
see what worries him.
Instead of focusing only on identifying risks, an approach that might
lead to resistance from the family (Turnell and Essex 2006), Andrew works
around the risk to build a network of safe people who are on hand or close by
and are willing to challenge any behaviors that might be harmful to the baby.
This includes neighbors previously unknown to the agency. One neighbor
agrees to play a part in the safety plan; the father introduces the neighbor to
Andrew, and after a brief conversation about helping, the neighbor agrees
to take part. (Neighbors can be helpful people when one is building safety
networks; often, as in this case, they just need to be asked.) Taking a tradi-
tional risk deficit approach would have steered the work away from the safety
network approach and would not have encouraged the family to draw on
their resources and support people. Andrew could have argued that the baby
needed to be removed, because the marshaling of a risk argument that defines
a situation as high risk is straightforward for workers and managers in cases
like this. Instead, Andrew works productively with the uncertainty.
What is challenging and perhaps anxiety-provoking for sociologists and
human service workers using this approach is working with the uncertainty
rather than trying to eliminate it, to search for safe people, and to find some
resources in the family life that can, over time, become safety features around
the baby. Sometimes the focus needs to be on the smallest indications that
things are improving. The uncertainty in this case was not dangerous—it was
just unknown.
Working with the risk and the uncertainty through the signs of safety
approach will not be comfortable for everyone. Powerful statements of parents
being “too high risk” feature in meetings and are noted throughout case
records. Workers can evaluate the situation using the signs of safety mapping
and scaling tool; this will help the professional network, including the lawyers
and managers involved with a case, to talk about how they are thinking about
(that is, how they are constructing) the risks for children. In the case above,
the signs of safety mapping and scaling tool showed that enough safety miti-
gated the uncertainty that worried the professionals involved. A key message
here is that being predefined as “high risk” can too easily and prematurely
shut out those who can offer the greatest safety to children: their own family
and the people in their immediate social and community network.
This brief case study is similar to ones commonly found in most child
welfare agencies. Agencies and managers are nervous in these situations. The
case helps to demonstrate that working with risk and safety as malleable
ideas, as states that can alter when safety is located and built on, is a tenet of
rigorous and respectful social work practice. If we think families are worth