Child protection court

documents: the power and

effects of professional

writing

Dr Chris Krogh School Humanities and Social Science

This presentation

• Information about and findings from

• Qualitative research

• Examining: the effects child protection court documents have on people involved with them

• Practice and policy implications

A starting point for this story

• Practice experience/origin

• Worked for (then) DoCS; child protection and out-of-home care

• You might have experienced: social work or human services degrees – writing as a technical process. E.g. • Accuracy • Relevance • Not interpretive – just the facts

• Limited contemplation of the power & possibilities of writing

• White & Epston (1990): Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends

• Followed the ‘narrative turn’ in anthropology and ethnography

Narrative paradigm

• We understand our lives using narrative structure • Characters • Events • Arranged in an order, according to time • Stated, implied or assumed causality

• Narratives created socially

• Not singular but multiple

• Some narratives come to dominate; others subordinated

• (Baldwin 2011; Combs & Freedman 2012; Loseke 2007; Wells 2011; White & Epton 1990)

Research background

• Documents as a constituent and active part of what goes on in Children’s Court matters (and the bureaucratised world, generally)

• Though not sufficiently considered

• Document agency (Brummans 2007; Cooren 2004; Fincham et al. 2011; Prior 2008)

• Assemblage theory – Bruno Latour (esp. 2005)

• Starting question • “what do child protection court documents do to people who are closely

involved with them?”

Other research

• Limited

• Prince, K. (1996). Boring records? communication, speech and writing in social work practice. London, United Kingdom: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

• Ross, N, Cocks, J, Johnston, L & Stoker, L 2017, ‘No voice, no opinion, nothing’: parent experiences when children are removed and placed in care, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia, <http://www.lwb.org.au/assets/Parent-perspectives-OOHC-Final-Report-Feb-2017.pdf>.

Research approach

• Read/reviewed child protection court documents relating to one matter (one child)

• Qualitative Document Analysis (Altheide et al. 2008) – ethnographic immersion in the subject

• Considered narrative elements: • plot, character, context, implied or stated causality • Constructed author • And assumed reader

• Then interviewed (2 times each) people involved with that case • Father • Caseworker • Casework manager • Solicitor • Magistrate

Interviews – focus areas/topics

• What did people remember about the documents in this matter, or about other matters more broadly?

• What would people say about the processes of creating the documents?

• What difference does it make that these documents were for court?

• What would the participants say about the effects of documents, as they experienced them, or other effects they have witnessed?

• Do documents play a role in the regulation of parenting?

• Are there gendered responses to documents?

What I read in the documents

• Narrative analysis (largely applied to fiction) • Plot; characters;

• Framing narratives – e.g. risk on the basis of drug use

• Micro narratives – all of the occasions when drug use was suspected

• Other documents (received on subpoena) interwoven; reinforcing

• Dominant and subordinated stories • A story present but not foregrounded – involvement and attachment

• Exemplified in contact reports

Interviews – what people talked about

• Structures of this context

• Civil court – evidence in affidavit, not verbal

• Community Services documents up to 500 pages long (with attachments)

• Anything not disputed is accepted as ‘fact’

• Parent/Dad

• I’m just a [tradesman] you know, I’m not some lawyer or anything.

• [They said] ‘this is what we were going to put into court’, and I looked at it and they said ‘you go through it’, and I said ‘but these are wrong’. I highlighted so much of it.

• I said ‘hang on, the judge is going to read this and it’s not correct’.

• ‘well that’s where you’ve got to get your lawyer’, that’s what they said to me, ‘you’ve got to get your lawyer to say that’s not correct’.

Resources and responsibility

• Degree-qualified professionals

• Parents might not have completed year 9 at school

• Community Services. At least three different professionals working on/reviewing the materials before going to court

• Parent – might get legal aid representation

• Onus on Community Services to be balanced; fair and look for materials that present parent’s positives as much as risk/harm issues

• Solicitor:

• No, of course not. Our job is to reply to the department’s material and sometimes we need to reply to a lot of those things that are attached to the affidavit.

• … we try and address each of the issues that the department’s raised in their affidavits, but we don’t have the luxury ... I mean my average affidavit will be five pages.

• And so lawyers acting for parents need to develop skills of sorting out what matters need to be answered and to be able to do that within... we need to be able to do that within, you know, within two hours at the most. I would spend two hours preparing an affidavit, that’s it.

Effects of documents

• For parents • Anger • Despair • Fight the details of the

materials (distracted from working for their children’s return)

• Ongoing anger

• Solicitor

• I had a guy ring me the other day who... I had in proceedings here about three years ago, and he got on the phone for twenty-five minutes, so angry, he has his daughter back with him now but he’s so angry ... he was talking about the documents, he said “all those things that were in those [Community Services] affidavits he said at least half of it was straight out lies or just someone’s reported something that wasn’t true but they stick it all in their affidavits”, and his anger... he’s just so angry ... he said “I just can’t live like this”. I said “you’ve got your daughter back”, and he said “but it’s eating away at me, the whole thing’s eating away at me”, and he kept talking about the affidavits ... he pulls them out sometimes and looks at them and they make him angry. They make him angry, and this is three years after it’s finished.

Effects of documents

• For parent – walking away

• But that’s why [I walked away], I just lost heart; I didn’t know how I was going to win this.

• If I’d had a great lawyer I believe I would have... I would have won, probably. but how much money was it going to take ...

• It was hard enough to go to work because I was that depressed. ... I was so broken-hearted from it all, to me it was plain on paper, I couldn’t understand why the judge was not reading it.

• For workers – reaching out to soften the blow

• Caseworker

• ... whenever I hand that first initial application about why we’re removing a child to a parent I always say to them “this is not going to be easy to read. You’re going to read stuff about yourself, and it’s never easy to read anything about yourself” …

• … it cannot not affect them. They’ve already had something happen anyway, an assumption or a removal, they’re in the court arena, that’s already horrific, but then they’re going to read in print...

• When it’s in print and you’re reading it I think it hits harder, so I’m always a little bit trying to prep them

Relevance for Outcomes Framework

• Empowerment; Social and Community

• Individual level focus – hope, information, skill-building, access to help/support; not structural changes

• For example (in this context) • Individual level – staying in education – literacy

• Providing more Legal Aid hours to increase ability to respond

Implications

• Practice • Adding to the ‘evidence’ collected in practice (evidence of love, care, responsiveness

etc. not just risk/harm)

• Prioritising the secondary audiences of our writing, not just the primary audience

• Policy • Endorse caseworkers’ ‘reaching out’ to people who are the subject of their writing

• Children’s Court – reviewing (and changing) evidence practices

• Research to understand better the links between document practices and meeting a ‘child’s best interests’

• Providing education to caseworkers, and at university, about documents, practice and power

References

• Altheide, D, Colyle, M, DeVriese, K & Schneider, C 2008, 'Emergent qualitative document analysis', in SN Hesse-Biber & P Leavy (eds), Handbook of Emergent Methods, The Giulford Press, New York.

• Baldwin, C 2011, 'Narrative rhetoric in expert reports: a case study', Narrative Works: Issues, Investigations, and Interventions, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 3-20, viewed 20 November 2016, <https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/NW/article/view/18793/20612>.

• Brummans, BHJM 2007, 'Death by document: tracing the agency of a text', Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 711-27, viewed 1 August 2013, DOI 10.1177/1077800407301185, (SAGE Premier).

• Clifford, J & Marcus, GE (eds) 1986, Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography, University of California Press, California, USA.

• Clifford, J 1986, 'Introduction: partial truths', in J Clifford & GE Marcus (eds), Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography, University of California Press, California, USA, pp. 1-26.

• Combs, G & Freedman, J 2012, 'Narrative, poststructuralism, and social justice: current practices in narrative therapy', The Counseling Psychologist, vol. 40, no. 7, pp. 1033-60, viewed 15 June 2014, DOI 10.1177/0011000012460662, (SAGE Premier).

• Frohmann, B 2008, 'Documentary ethics, ontology, and politics', Archival Science, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 165-80, DOI 10.1007/s10502-008-9073-y.

• Latour, B 2005, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

• Loseke, DR 2007, 'The study of identity as cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives: theoretical and empirical integrations', Sociological Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 661-88, viewed 5 March 2014, DOI 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2007.00096.x, (EBSCOhost).

• Marcus, GE & Fisher, MMJ 1986, Anthropology as cultural critique: an experimental moment in the human sciences, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA.

• Prince, K 1996, Boring records? communication, speech and writing in social work practice, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London, United Kingdom.

• Wells, K 2011, Narrative Inquiry, Oxford University Press, viewed 18 May 2014, DOI 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195385793.003.0001, (Oxford Scholarship Online).

• White, M & Epston, D 1990, Narrative means to therapeutic ends, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, USA.