Child Protection Policies in Ireland: Analysis - IT Carlow 2017

This essay provides a critical analysis of child protection policies and practices in Ireland, focusing on the Children First Act 2011 and subsequent guidelines. It examines critical issues in childcare practices, including the effectiveness of the act and related legislation like the Domestic Violence Act. The essay discusses reporting procedures for child abuse, highlighting the responsibilities of individuals and organizations, as well as the potential pitfalls of mandated reporting. It also addresses challenges related to interagency working, such as funding conflicts and communication gaps, and suggests ways to improve collaboration. Furthermore, the essay explores risk assessment methods, comparing actuarial and consensus-based approaches, and concludes by emphasizing the vulnerability of children and the importance of robust protection measures.

Running head: CHILD PROTECTION POLICIES
CHILD PROTECTION POLICIES IN IRELAND
Name of the student
Name of the University
Author note

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Introduction
Child protection has become one of the key issues in the globalized world, where every
welfare organization is thoughtful about their rights, care and development (Harding 2014). As
every society has its own way to care for children, due to their religion, economic status, socio
economic culture and political context, states also create legislations and protection rights with
respect to those norms of society that maximized the risk of children being abused or misused.
These risk factors includes, breakdown of extended family system, traditional norms and poverty
that affects children emotionally as well as mentally and risks their growth and development
(Sugiyama et al. 2012). The United Nations International Children Education Fund or UNICEF
works in over 130 countries to protect and provide these children their basic fundamental rights
and the organization is determined to change the shift of society from abusive to protective for
these children (UNICEF 2014). The purpose of this assignment is to point out different current
practices of Ireland regarding childcare protection and safety. Further, the assignment will focus
on the risk assessment procedures and will discuss the reporting procedure and issues regarding
interagency working in this topic. The risk assessment, risk management framework will be
depending on a coherent multiagency concept, which will be presented in this assignment.
Aim
The prime aim of this assignment is to analyze different policies and practices of Ireland
related to childcare critically. Furthermore, it will aim to point out the loopholes in the child
protection policies and conduct a risk assessment.

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Critical issues in child care practices
The first childcare act was proposed in the Irish assembly back in 1996. This act was
empowering for children as it had a clause related to juvenile justice and according to that, the
physicians had the power to approve or reject any children who is physically or mentally for fit
for such punishments, given by juvenile court (Child Protection Guidelines 2017). However, in
2011, the Irish government launched a guideline namely the Children Fist Guidelines (2011) that
claims to protect children for physical and mental abuse as well as neglect. To understand the
effectiveness of this act Devaney and McGregor (2016) conducted a retrospective review that
aimed to identify the lags in the program, training of the volunteers and its future implication.
The researchers conducted interviews and surveys to understand the competency level of the
workers involved in this childcare policy and have attended the training program provided by the
Irish government to implement the Children first act successfully. For quantitative analysis, 112
participants of CF guidelines trainees were provided a questionnaire and were asked about the
process, its loopholes and future implications according to them. After the competition of the
analysis it was found that maximum of the respondents thought that the policy was able to
protect children’s rights in every aspect and the Irish government was able to spread awareness
in the society about the policy. However, 13% respondents believes that maximum of the
trainees have joined this social work as their profession that may harm the noble step in future
(Devaney and McGregor 2016).
Furthermore, there are several other acts, proposed by the Irish government to protect the
right of education, safety, nutrition and mental health of children. Hence, the acts such as
Freedom of Information, 1997; protection for person reporting child abuse, the education act
1998, domestic violence act 1996 has been proposed by the government. Within these, the

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domestic violence act for childcare bears huge importance as the number of crimes against
children has been increased tremendously. It provides the health bodies with the ability to
interfere in the violent situation and save the children and his family from violence. However
Featherstone, Morris and White (2013) thinks that there is not much discussion about this section
of child protection and therefore, the government should focus on this section of child care act as
increasing inequality, mental illness and increasing diversity in the society has stopped people to
discuss such issues publically. Hence, the government should focus on ideas to resume such
dialogue in the society to spread the awareness about violence against children. Further, the
review conducted by these researchers indicated to the fact that the government should focus on
improved family practices as it helps in maintaining and sustaining love connection and support
that ultimately helps to protect the children of that family (Featherstone, Morris and White
2013).
Reporting procedures in child protection
According to the child protection and healthcare of Ireland, there are four segments of
children abuse such as emotional abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse and neglect and reporting
of children abuse reports are done according to these four sections (Health Service Executive
Ireland 2012). Therefore, according to the government of Ireland, it is the responsibility of the
each individual in the country to report against any unusual practice, which is against the
mandate of the children first act 2011. The reporting procedure. There are different reporting
guidelines for government and non-government organizations for reporting against the individual
or practices abusing children in the society (TUSLA 2018). If the reporting is done in the Health
and Safety Executive office of Ireland (HSE), then the HSE officer is responsible to provide
protection to the person reporting such incidence and take appropriate decision regarding child

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protection and welfare. However, anonymous and malicious referrals are also covered under the
children first act and according to it, there is a provision in the act referring to the protection of
person reporting the child abuse act 1998, which mentions if the person reporting child abuse
proven guilty of reporting false news, then he will be punished (Health Service Executive Ireland
2012).
After the reporting of the children abuse, the parents of the child have to undergo two
lawful procedures such as screening and preliminary enquiry. The social worker, assessing the
child abusive case is free to interrogate the parents or respective individuals and if the person
needs any outside support, the government helps the social worker with that (TUSLA 2018).
Finally, after the preliminary assessment, the case is referred as child abusive case or a welfare
case. After the reporting procedure, it is the responsibility of the social workers to take care of
the child’s safety and developmental needs, to assess the parent’s capacity to meet their
children’s nutrition and educational needs and research about the environmental or social factors
affecting child’s mental or physical health (Health Service Executive Ireland 2012).
According to the governmental analysis, the reporting procedure has led the social
workers to investigate and report a wide array of crimes against children. However, critics
believe that mandating the reporting procedure created a big loophole in the practice. According
to (), the child protection unit working under the children first act 2011, determines that their
agency determines their entire resources on investigation and reporting. However, it was found
that only 5 to 10 percent of workers invests their time in investigation with respect to other
functions such as providing care and support to children. Hence the agency most of the time,
fails to detect the criminal involved in such crime.

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Issues related to interagency working
As the previous section determines that, the Irish government is keen to implement the
children first act through government well as private organizations so that the entire society can
be involved in the process of child protection and child development (Child Protection
Guidelines 2017). To fulfil this objective organizations such as public and private schools,
service and agencies are being encouraged by the government so that they can contribute in this
cause and volunteer their employees as social workers who will be reporting and interrogating
such incidents in their locality. However, there are several issues or challenges regarding
working in such multi-agency or interagency working, that affects the primary objective of this
project (Davidson et al. 2012). The primary concern is regarding the funding process as multiple
agencies involves in conflicts due to funding issues from the government and leads to delay in
training and development needs as well as service delay. Secondly, sometimes it is difficult for
organizations such as healthcare settings and schools to transform their working environment and
work for different context (Coates 2017). Furthermore, after completing their conventional
works, there are very limited amount of these employees can provide to the childcare program.
Several other issues increases the limitations that are communication gap and lack of clarity from
the higher authority on the roles and responsibility. Finally, the denial from employees of
different public and private employees on working 24X7 on the project can be limiting, as
additional stress and responsibilities are imposed on the employees without any pay or
increment. Furthermore, these multiagency workers lack coherent aim, team spirit and joint
interventions due to which the duplication of services occurs (Hood 2014).
However, there are certain ways described by different researchers that can be
implemented by the government authorities to make these negative assessments in to positive

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ones. The organizations should focus on sharing important informations and the government
should publish government circulations so that every organization attached with such cause can
be informed about the aims and objectives equally. Further, the government should focus on
improving the skills of the employees registered as social workers by providing them training so
that they are aware of the flow of their process and document each process according to the
policy (Davidson et al. 2012).
Risk assessment
The global society as well as the Ireland government is shifting the child protection
assessment from clinical decision making to standardized assessment tools. Hence, there is a
debate amongst researchers regarding the effectiveness of these tools (Skivenes and Stenberg
2015). Therefore, it is important to understand these two risk-assessment processes used in child
protection programs. The actuarial assessment tool is used different statistical analysis to
understand the patter of child abuse in the society and after that the practitioners provide the
assessment report to the parents and with respect to that score, further decisions are made (Neal
and Grisso 2014). On the other hand, the consensus based assessment tool utilizes different child
abusive literatures and derives different opinions of expert practitioners. Therefore, using these
literatures and opinions the process is able to bridge the gap between the clinical and actuarial
decision-making processes (Duru et al. 2013). Further, after collecting all these data, the
practitioner provides individual risk score and as per the consensus based approach, the
practitioner possess the independence to provide a risk score to the patient depending on his or
her personal intuition (Coohey et al. 2013).

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However, both these risk assessment procedures possess their strengths and weaknesses
that lead to success or limitations to the process. The strengths of actuarial assessment tool is that
it focuses on limited aspects that led it to focus on important factor and provide precise estimate
regarding child abuse. However, by doing so, it fails to focus on unique and unusual contexts
that needs complex assessment tools such as consensus based assessment tool for identification.
On the other hand, the consensus-based assessment provides a flexible approach to the
assessment process and conducts a comprehensive assessment of risk. However, the risk
indicators in this process are poorly conceptualize as completely dependent on personal
assessment of researchers. Further, the process uses the same variable to detect and predict
different cases of children abuse whereas as per Annerbäck et al. (2012), different cases of child
abuse has different indicators. Hence, these ambiguous risk indicators diverts the aim of the child
protection program and leads to decrease the effect of the process.
Conclusion
As the UNICEF has declared children as the most vulnerable society in the world, nations
have focused their policies and norms to protect the rights of these children. There are different
ways through which these children are being abused and hence UNICEF has focused their work
in 130 countries to protect the rights of those children. Ireland is also suffering from child
abusive cases and therefore the government launched the children first guidelines in 2011. The
assignment provides critics of the childcare guidelines of Ireland according to which, the
children first guidelines lacked several aspects such as the government should focus on resuming
the dialogue over this social taboo. Furthermore, the assignment provided the reporting
procedures of child abuses, discussed the shortcoming of working in multi-agency workforce,
and provided few interventions that can be applied by the government so that this interagency

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workforce can work as a team against such major concern of society, children abuse. Finally, the
assignment discussed the risk assessment process and provided the strengths and weaknesses of
the process.

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