Creating Resilience with Child Protection Using Community Development practices and Principles
The terms Resilience and Coping invoke experiences of disadvantage, deprivation, crisis and harm. Professional assistance or treatment for people experiencing these circumstances has tended to focus on individual or group recovery which may or may not recognise or seek to use the strengths and capacities present in the people experiencing the crises. Child abuse is a specific occurrence of crisis or harm which has attracted a recovery approach. In addition to the necessary therapeutic approaches and investigatory actions to be applied in child protection work, we maintain that developmental approaches have a vital role to play in keeping children safe. While community development has been traditionally to encourage collaborative strategies to address structural disadvantage and deprivation, it has been less used for the practice of protecting children. The principles and practices of community development have the potential for providing a framework incorporating strengths and capacities for protecting children. In this presentation we consider the role played by community development in contributing to the protection of children. This takes the strengths approach to build and support capacities in families. Using experiences from practice in several settings in Norway, Western Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand we outline this developmental approach to child protection.
