Looking for Children: An Alternative Crown Ward Review

Abstract

<p>As child welfare practice in Ontario attempts to move toward increased partnerships with families, and recognition of the ways in which social work is implicated in perpetuating marginalities through the application of an anti-oppressive lens, direct social work practice with children lacks a similar critical discourse. Social work practice with children in care in Ontario occurs in the context of a guided practice model, Looking After Children, and within numerous audited standards and compliances. It is a bureaucratic and managerial environment which can constrain the social work agenda with children whose voices are easily silenced. This qualitative research study looks at the plans of care or social work recording for 10 Crown Wards in Ontario, in a search for a ‘real child.’ A critical analysis revealed that children are known in the recordings created about them in limited and prescribed ways. A “looked after” child is revealed: a child known according to the specific developmental dimensions of the Looking After Children model, and within “compliant” social work practice. What is lost is a child who exists in their child welfare record, in all of their complexities, contexts and relationships, while the social work relationship is rendered invisible.</p>