Common sense, clarity and a feel for the game: participation in child and family social work through a Bourdieusian lens

Abstract

In child protection social work, children and their circumstances are unique, often lacking in clarity and requiring a subjective view. For social workers, the dominant discourse is safeguarding and, in certain circumstances, identifying, predicting and analysing risk of harm may be straightforward. Once established, social workers can offer appropriate support, money and access to services for the child and family. However, whilst social workers regularly assign ‘risk of harm’ as the dominant discourse, the deeper layers and lived experiences of children and families create alternative, competing discourses from a service user perspective, leading to a false clarity. With children and their parents often excluded from iterative participatory processes, their progression in the field of child protection is curtailed and their experiences and opinions unheard. Lack of clarity is then evident in what children and families do not know about their own child protection planning. Using Bourdieu’s (1990) concepts of social space (field) and illusio, this chapter will explore how ‘common sense’ and ‘clarity’ practice for social workers and related actors may be new and confusing to children and parents with no previous experience of social work. For children who may already have a ‘feel for the game’ (illusio), the “rhetoric of participation does not sit easily within statutory child protection services, particularly when the child is an involuntary high-risk client” (Dillon, Greenop and Hills, 2016:75). This chapter will therefore suggest creative ways in which children can gain clarity and meaningfully participate in their own child protection planning.