80 ● Emily Keddell and tony Stanley
cared for them. What followed was harsh and unforgiving media criticism of
the human service workers, and we expect as a result a renewed emphasis on
avoiding risk, following rules, and filling out forms. Paradoxically, the strong
compliance messages focused on form filling detract from innovative work
with risk because compliance requires that the time spent with families be
dominated by gathering the information necessary to inform the paperwork.
This overly bureaucratic approach tends to be combined with the practice
habits of human service workers staying narrowly focused on the perceived
“safest” option for children, such as removing children from their families
(Stanley 2013). Narrow understandings of risk continue to influence human
service practice, despite the fact that neither form filling nor risk avoidance
successfully safeguards children’s well-being, and so the cycle of deskilling and
fragmenting families is perpetuated. Shifting practice to strengths and safety-
oriented approaches is difficult, of course, given these influences. It can be
likened to trying to turn an oil tanker in strong waters: challenging, but not
impossible. We believe that a move to strengths and safety-oriented practice
may perhaps be slow, but it is a worthy direction.
ConclusionIn this chapter, we have shown that dominant discourses of risk can lead
to overly deterministic assessments of family functioning and narrow
approaches to keeping children safe from harm. We can offer more humane
child protective services to children and families when we recognize the role
that families and the wider community can play in effecting changes that
ensure children are safer. In order to be braver in practice, and work with risk,
human service workers need to understand how risk operates. Practitioners
from all disciplines require a critical approach to understand how they make
sense of risk discourses—that is, how they understand the sets of meaning
that operate beneath language. Fook (2002, 115) explained why: “The ways
in which we assess problems, and the ways we describe and define them are of
course integrally connected with the ways in which we construct knowledge
of our world and [this is] bound up with how we conceptualise and assess the
‘problems’ with which we work.”
Risk discourses are affected by risk thinking and by the policy orientation
of countries. The use of strengths perspectives and safety-oriented approaches,
such as the signs of safety approach, can offer a significant way forward for
practitioners. We agree with Featherstone, White, and Morris (2014) when
they argued that a more humane practice will only emerge when we resist
the tendency to swiftly remove “at-risk” children from their families and
communities. This shift in thinking will not be comfortable for everyone;