Summary
In the United States and the United Kingdom supervisory neglect of children is premised on a construction of childhood which characterises children as essentially vulnerable and in need of constant care and protection by parents. This Western conception has been transmitted to the countries of the sub-Sahara via the Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, the socio-economic and cultural context of African countries differs significantly from those of the United Kingdom and the United States. The incorporation of a Western hegemonic idea of childhood into the national laws of African countries creates fundamental contradictions in the application of criteria for adjudging the adequacy of parental supervision in the sub-Sahara. Drawing on secondary data, this article explores these contradictions and proposes alternative considerations in the conceptualisation and assessment of supervisory neglect.
Finding
The combined effects on households in the sub-Sahara of economic conditions, ascribed gender roles and the reciprocal duties held by children to assist their families, contest established indicators and thresholds for supervisory neglect. The concept of societal neglect together with the application of the Haddon Matrix provides a more apposite framework for reducing the risk of significant harm to children.
Application
All African countries, excepting Somalia, have introduced the Convention on the Rights of the Child through domestic legislation. The findings of this study are pertinent to policy-makers and social workers in the sub-Sahara. They also invite Western scholars to critically engage with dominant notions of supervisory neglect and re-appraise its applicability in cross-national contexts.
The New Policy Agenda of the Reagan and Thatcher years has profoundly influenced aid flows from the industrialized countries of North America and Western Europe to the developing nations of sub-Saharan Africa. The application of neo-liberal principles to the disbursement of multilateral and bilateral aid for social development has resulted in the diversion of donor funding away from the public sector towards non-governmental organizations. The consequences of relegating the role of the public sector in social development is explored through qualitative research conducted in Ghana with state-employed community development workers. The study exposes how severe financial constraint within the state sector distorts the targeting of beneficiaries and social development activity. This differs from findings revealed by interviews with social development workers employed by international non-governmental organizations. These indicate that such agencies are able to sustain effectively resourced fieldworkers who are in a position to form positive working relationships with beneficiaries. The circumstances of the Department of Community Development and its relationships with non-governmental agencies in Ghana are used to explore the effects on state-building of the New Policy Agenda in the sub-Saharan region.
Since 2010, the United Kingdom has witnessed a number of initiatives that shift away from reliance on performance management to improve social work with children and families, towards a renewed interest in practice models. This study reports on the evaluation of a local government programme in England to introduce and embed systemic family practice through the roll out of intensive training to social workers and frontline managers. It was anticipated through the programme that child protection social workers would undertake more direct work with families and build more positive relationships, resulting in a fall in the number of child protection plans and children experiencing repeat periods of care. The evaluation adopted a mixed-method approach encompassing an online survey of social workers, interviews with team managers and family members, a case audit and statistical analysis of local level metrics. It found limited employment of systemic family practice or improvement due to the programme. Adopting the 7 S framework, this study examines the barriers to and facilitators of successful change and identifies generic considerations for change programmes in child protection social work.
This study critically considers the applicability of conceptions of child neglect that have been theorised by British and American scholars and promulgated in African countries through the domestication of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The child protection legislation of five sub‐Saharan nations was compared in order to examine the presumptions embedded in their provisions concerning child neglect. These were then appraised in relation to the socio‐economic conditions pertaining in each country. Food insecurity, over‐reliance on staples and high infection rates among children in conjunction with hard to access health care and poor quality services contest the validity and relevance of dominant Anglo‐centric definitions of child neglect and methods for detecting it. The study concluded that greater congruence between national child protection legislation and the socio‐economic challenges faced by families in sub‐Saharan countries would better protect children against neglect.
Key Practitioner Message: ● Child neglect is an ethnocentric concept that requires interrogation to test its relevance before applying it to developing country contexts. ● In sub‐Saharan countries, conditions of absolute poverty and grossly inadequate public services profoundly affect the ability of parents or guardians to meet their children's basic needs. ● Laws that frame child protection systems need to recognise the inter‐relationship between public services, poverty and parental care in the neglect of children.
There has been exhaustive scrutiny of the policies of the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations Population Fund. UNICEF, despite a prominent role in agenda setting for children's welfare in developing countries, has not been subject to comparable scrutiny. This paper argues that the Country Programmes promulgated by UNICEF to improve children's welfare reflect ethnocentric conceptualisations of the family. As a case study, Ghana's Country Programme 2001–2005 is considered in detail. Anthropological studies are adduced to highlight underlying ethnocentric assumptions around social organisation. The ramifications of these assumptions are then considered.
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