The Heroic Pursuit of Making a Difference in Child Protection

The work of social workers in child protection is often subject to criticism and disputes, mainly because they operate in a complex web that intersects socio-cultural representations of family responsibilities, child welfare, the role of the State (Bertotti, 2017). To address some of these criticisms, in 2017, the Italian National Foundation of Social Workers launched a national study on the "Role and Quality of Social Work in Child Protection System" (FNAS, CNOAS, CROAS, 2020), exploring three different aspects of the role. This presentation focuses on one research module exploring the enacted role and investigating social workers' perceptions of their ability to make a difference. In this module, 12 social workers were invited to share situations where they believed their intervention had decisively influenced children’s conditions. Although practitioners acknowledge and critique the contradictions and fatigues of the CPS, these challenges are viewed as unchangeable. As a result, attempts to make a difference appear as practices rooted in an individualistic and personalised approach On one hand, practitioners often resort to personal acts of resistance within the constraints of bureaucratic structures. They justify this disregard of rules, institutional protocols or consolidated practices asserting their professional autonomy, and leveraging personal discretion to navigate complex cases. This exercise of discretion is frequently portrayed through what we name as a ‘heroic’ narrative - where practitioners describe themselves as lonely struggling against limitations to advocate for the well-being of children. Within this personal resistance, actions are narrated being shaped and guided by two main forces; values on the one hand and intuition and feelings on the other. Drawing from the analysis of the interviews we will outline the characters of this attitude, showing how the theoretical keys within a broader meso-macro frame disappear, replaced by calls to values or to intuition, based on emotional contact. On the other hand, typically centred around the individual service user, interventions are constructed with a focus on the person in need of protection, often neglecting broader social, institutional, or structural factors. Neglecting these factors, we argue, practitioners are stuck in the binary and adversarial perspective and the systemic and contextual nature of family relationships disappears. This dual focus on individual agency - both in terms of practitioner discretion and the targets of intervention - highlights the need for a critical, dissenting approach that moves beyond individual resistance, fosters a wider understanding of child protection interventions and promotes collaborative strategies aimed at structural change.