Search

New Zealand is undergoing major change in service delivery to children and families. A new Ministry for Children Oranga Tamariki has been established to oversee 5 work streams, one of which provides intensive intervention with families requiring a statutory response to child protection concerns. The government minister responsible promised that the service would be child‐centred and trauma‐informed. To date, these terms remain undefined, and there is no shared understanding of their meaning. Practice frameworks to support the work of the new ministry are still being developed, creating something of a vacuum in the meantime. The focus of this paper is the challenge of implementing trauma‐informed practice in the child protection service provided by the Intensive Intervention work stream. Limited research or commentary on trauma‐informed practice in this context currently exists. Drawing on the relevant available literature, the concept and its application in child protection social work is explored. An ecological framework is used to discuss the changes needed to achieve this. Particular attention is paid to the impact of historical trauma for indigenous people due to New Zealand's colonial history and their over‐representation in care and protection services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the concepts underpinning the reasoning processes of social worker's decision‐making provides important insights into how social work practice is undertaken. This paper examines one of the major discourses used by social workers in decision reasoning in a non‐governmental organization child protection context in Aotearoa/New Zealand: family maintenance. This study found that family maintenance as a concept was strongly privileged by social workers. This resulted in attempts to preserve families and created a hierarchy of preferred decision outcomes. A preference for family maintenance was supported by legal, moral, psychological and Māori cultural concepts. This pattern of constructs underpinned the ‘weighing up of harms’ when considering removal, and generally reflected a child welfare orientation. In addition to this, it was found that ‘family’ was broadly defined, and could include people who had a relationship with the children, or Māori definitions of extended family, in addition to legal ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]