This article explores family members’ perspectives on child protection interventions within the current neoliberal and punitive policy and practice contexts. The material is drawn from the ‘Giving Poverty a Voice’ social worker training project, a collaborative project involving family members and activists from ATD Fourth World (the international anti-poverty organisation), academics in the field of social work and practitioners, including social workers, lawyers and ATD Fourth World team members.
INTRODUCTION: The escalation of coercive, risk-averse policy directives in Aotearoa New Zealand’s child and family social work sphere is undermining the profession’s potential to meet its social justice, human rights based aspirations. Social workers may need to look further afield for best practice models that facilitate emancipatory practice in neoliberal social policy environments. This article posits the radical practice of anti-poverty organisation ATD Fourth World in England (where child protection is characteristically risk-averse, individualised and coercive), as an alternative for work with families experiencing poverty and social exclusion.METHODS: We drew on the voices of ATD Fourth World activists cited in previous publications, alongside Activists(a-d) interviewed specifically for this article, and Activist(e) who contributed at a roundtable discussion on a previous project. Interviews focused on ATD Fourth World’s approach to working with families in poverty; three distinctive aspects emerged: the organisation’s philosophy on poverty, and its collaborative and relational family support model. We contrasted these three aspects with state child protection policies in Aotearoa New Zealand and England.FINDINGS: The often inflexible, top-down nature of state child protection policies, coupled with an atmosphere of policing, control and disregard for the impact of poverty, constrain social workers and families alike, eroding the crucial social worker/family relationship underpinning best practice. ATD Fourth World’s approach suggests that genuine strengths-based practice relies on nuanced understandings of poverty, a commitment to advance families’ wishes, and trusting relationships grounded in human dignity and commonality.CONCLUSION: The Aotearoa New Zealand reforms may amplify coercive, risk-averse tendencies in the state’s child protection system. Child and family social workers could consider adapting aspects of ATD Fourth World’s approach to resist or mitigate these coercive aspects and steer the reforms’ implementation in more emancipatory directions.
For the first time since the enactment of the Waste Minimisation Act 2008, New Zealand is applying regulated (or mandatory) product stewardship to several priority products. By making those who manufacture, sell and use products responsible for minimising the waste those products cause, well-designed product stewardship schemes can act as a critical tool in the transition to a circular economy. However, the New Zealand government has put its faith in industry to lead scheme design. Such an approach threatens to vitiate robust, ambitious schemes and foreground industry interests over those of wider society and the natural environment. This article juxtaposes the radical potential of product stewardship against the probable outcome of industry-led schemes, and recommends reforms that the minister for the environment should pursue in order to shift the dial towards more inclusive design of product stewardship schemes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.