Social workers believe racial bias greatly affects child protection practice, a poll has found.
This follows a recent report by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel on the impact of race, ethnicity and culture on cases where children have died or suffered serious harm.
The case reviews studied, which involved mixed-heritage, black and Asian children, were “silent” about the presence of racial bias in professionals’ decision making and on the role of racism in services’ responses to families.
The panel found that children’s race and ethnicity were often not recognised, appropriately explored or understood by practitioners, resulting in them not having a full understanding of children’s lived experience and the vulnerabilities they faced.
Only 7% said racial bias affected child protection practice “not at all”, while 5% believed there was “little” influence.
The national panel’s report is the latest in a series of studies to highlight issues with the way the social care system responds to children and families from black, Asian and ethnic minority communities.
Practitioners did not sufficiently consider children’s needs in relation to their race, ethnicity and culture in responding to child sexual abuse, found a review last year carried out for the panel by the Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse.
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What I love about these surveys on social work and social workers is the constant message that social workers are failures on race.abd culture when practicing but we never get to know if social workers say that social workers are failing I’d the failing social worker themselves or some other social worker. If outcomes are poor then surely it’s the actor who is failing not the the supposed script they are ‘forced’ to act out. When I was in a band our lead guitarist thought he was a genius let down by the drummer. Turned out the drummer knew which key the songs were in and the guitar player was a tone deaf. Lessons there I think.
So 71% of respondents believe racial bias/blindness of social workers silences the voice of the child. Assuming those virtuous 71% are the ones not silencing the child, what are they doing to ensure
those they work with who are are held to account? Begs the question really doesn’t it?
I feel like the key to understanding any polls in community re social work is pick the worst possible outcome /answer and guarantee that’s the one the majority will have opted for. It’s mostly always the same with all of these polls. Everything is terrible it seems on all fronts.
Woe is me pessimism is the core of most social workers poll or no poll in Community Care. Apparently no one loves us and we are the most undervalued of the heroes, see another CC article, so it’s a self perpetuating affirmation of the awfulness of our lot. Again. Begs the question though doesn’t it why recruitment numbers have gone up. There cant be so many thousands of masochists in our society surely. On the other hand there are many many social workers who diligently turn up for work day in day out trying our best to work with the hood snd the bad in our jobs. Picks your poll picks your realities I suppose.
Very well put. For my part I would like to come to my workplace just once without having to hear yet another tearful voice bringing down the mood by recounting the many slights, real or frankly often imagined, suffered without even having yet set foot off the premises. Social work is stressful, it’s often not appreciated and there are many reasons to resent the hand we have been dealt with but it’s no more challenging than the stories my ICU nurse partner recounts to me over dinner. There isn’t a hierarchy of misery and the self destructive narratives around how awful social worker experiences are not only paralyse individuals but thoroughly depresses those around them. Support each other but also be honest when hearing stories that often do not add up. Heresy I know but truth is cleansing.
When it comes to racial bias I continue to be amazed as to why white practitioners are so defended. Not only data but the lived experiences of those retelling their stories testifies to the discriminatory practices that actually occur. Rather than spending so much time defending the indefensible why can’t white social workers accept it and do something about their practice. Institutional and systemic racism is too often an excuse to do nothing. If individual social workers start with themselves and then challenge their organisational policies the situation could change!
There have been Black practitioners and academics who have been researching and sharing information about this for decades this is not a new phenomena.
Arlene P Weekes, Shirleecia Ward, Parenting is not easy in a racialized society: Decolonizing childcare practice, The British Journal of Social Work, 2025;, bcaf031, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcaf031
At least a decade of academics, consultants, experts by experience and endless commentators none of whom have made a blind but if difference so it does really beg the question who benefits from real or perceived bias. Academics publish their research, commentators get paid for their pearls, consultants are rewarded handsomely for actually perpetrating failures and worse by regurgitating the same old narrative to white guilt tortured ‘leaders’. For me the questions not the answers are complicated. In a social work obsessed with atomising alienation, unhappiness, oppression, abuse and anomie into individualised experiences of course nothing changes. Social work ‘intellectuals’ think the bubble they complacently wallow in is a real world when in fact it’s a choreographed shadow dance of like minded actors pretending to debate and disagree. Depoliticised drivel playing on notions if colour and guilt is as far removed from tackling racism and bias as a shark is from a grapefruit. Endless words, endless public funds to sustain careers based on one note riffing is all that social work is now. Time was we understood how our social relations worked, we understood where that our personal interests were tangled within our class interests. Time was politics and the mechanisms that underpin it were bread and butter to social workers not the eye rolling embarrassment it’s now perceived as. So no, I do not think that the decades of research, much of it of dubious provenance if my own research if to be trusted, has said anything that goes beyond reflecting a culture that thinks feeling guilty or being made to feel guilty is or will be capable of changing how social work tackles inequality, bias or racism. Most research grant committees treat seriously only those proposals that perpetuate gloom and hopelessness and which confirm the endemic bias they have that everything is so overwhelmingly awful that in actuality nothing could ever change. For that matter most researchers, commentators and consultants are so wedded to the neo-liberal notions of individuality that the real picture of us living in a purposely unequal society escapes them. Decolonise all you want, and we do want for there is funding up for grabs, but mostly that’s an intellectual endeavour not a real politics one of getting dirty and questioning the here and now. Status is all in social work which is why a perpetuating elite gets asked to say and then repeat the same old narrative while real children and real families and real communities are in truth at best an after thought. You want to tackle racial bias? Start by not wasting public funds on rewarding the same cohort of consultants for saying the same things without achieving anything, endlessly. Who is defending “white practicioners” by the way? And what does that actually mean? Bad practice isn’t colour dependent. And it would be a tad more useful if bias was defined rather than used as a trigger word the questioning of which seems to be out of bounds. I believe in solidarity not cultural uniqueness. That makes me a bad social worker no doubt but then I get my validation from the children and adults I work alongside. If they think I’m a bigot it matters to me. The privileged talking to other elites about how awful practitioners are matters not a jot. Fewer repeats and more analysis of why we do what we do and for whose benefit would pique my interest. Until then I’m off to my volunteering at the local food bank where real humans with real lives live in the variety of their skin colours, their cultural values, their sexuality their own poverty or like me in our relative comforts and who actually and practically challenge and think about bias without need of intellectual crutches or the hollowness of needing to induce a hierarchy of worthyness. Kwame Ture said way back to be beware of those accepting symbols instead of change. I suspect he would have understood which one “white practitioners” fitted. It’s not the one that starts with S.
Wow. And thanks.
I have rarely read such an uplifting and truth filled account of how wedded we have become to a narrative of blame, baseless assertions and obsessive regurgitation of almost by now meaningless guilt tripping. Sad to reflect that if Abdul was to say this in a social work setting they would be vilified as a racist. We don’t have debates snymore, we don’t low dissenting voices anymore and we rely too much on the supposed, but in reality self ascribed, wisdom and expertise of non-practitioners. Is there bias in social work? Undoubtedly. But the deflection that it’s a white social worker problem is problematic for no other reason that it conceals the wide ranging reach of this. My devout Christian and Muslim colleague say and sometimes do things that I find objectionable and sometimes disturbing. Do some white docisl eirkets across rhe same too? Of course. But we only seem to feel comfortable tackling, confronting and holding to account one part of the equation. That’s might satisfy but it doesn’t tackle.