The attitudes and beliefs of the child protection workforce and why they matter to children who live with violence

Abstract

In Australia, like other developed countries, there has been an increase in reports to child protection services about children experiencing domestic violence. While there is research on the importance of the skills and knowledge of the child protection workforce for this growing problem, little is available about practitioner attitudes and beliefs. This paper presents findings on research undertaken in New South Wales, which is the most populated state in Australia. The research considered the attitudes and beliefs of the statutory child protection workforce about domestic violence. It relied on a large-scale survey of 1041 child protection practitioners. In order to compare the attitudes and beliefs of child protection workforce with those of the general community, the survey replicated questions from the Australian National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Surveys. Overall, the attitudes and beliefs of the workforce more closely reflected contemporary theory and evidence about domestic violence than those of the community. The research also examined variations in the attitudes and beliefs of the child protection workforce according to practitioner characteristics, finding variations by gender. The implications for the fields of child protection and social work are discussed.

Professional Skills in Family Support: A Systematic Review

“…Eight studies emphasized technical skills, including confrontation skills ; motivational communication techniques (Schultz et al 2019;Stabler et al 2020); intervention techniques that take into account cultural diversity (Leake et al 2010;Lindsay et al 2014); intervention techniques for domestic family violence (Cort and Cline 2017;Dolan et al 2018), and trauma intervention techniques (Bosk et al 2020). Nine studies reflected on specific knowledge at the intervention level, such as understanding the family context (Brassart et al 2017;Gladstone et al 2014;Hafford-Letchfield et al 2020;Rawlings and Blackmer 2019), personalization and adaptation of the intervention to the family needs (Stanford et al 2020), psychosocial risk assessments (Alexander et al 2023;Trawver and Brocious 2023), and the use of specific assessment instruments (Rawlings and Blackmer 2019;Sletten and Ellingsen 2020).…”

“…The study did not include an independent control group. 60% Alexander et al (2023) Understand whether the attitudes and beliefs of child protection professionals varied from those of the public regarding domestic violence.…”

Cultivating child and youth decision‐making: The principles and practices of the ReSPECT approach to professional development

“…PD to build practitioner capacity is a growing strategy utilised to encourage child participation and has been found to have a positive impact on staff attitudes and beliefs in participatory practice (Alexander et al, 2023). There are short PD courses available online that address participation, such as child rights courses delivered through the 'edX' platform (edX, 2023) , 2023).…”