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Safeguarding Analysis

Professor Liz Davies: register of children not identified at risk is wrong

Emeritus Professor in Social Work, Liz Davies, wrote in The Guardian newspaper about why keeping a register of children who frequently visit hospital is an abuse of children’s rights and disproportionate intrusion by the state and what is instead needed to protect children from abuse

“It would also seem that the minister is unilaterally deciding that what is now required is monitoring, not only of children identified by professionals as at risk of harm, but those children who happen to be in care or to make frequent visits to hospitals.

Including these, often non-abused children, in health surveillance systems involves a serious erosion and breach of children’s rights and an unprecedented, and disproportionate, intrusion by the state into family life.

The Child Protection Register, abolished in 2008, provided a proportionate intervention by the state because it focused multi-agency professional attention on children who had been identified as at high risk of actual or likely harm following joint investigation by police, social workers and other professionals.”


Read more

A&E database is not the answer to child protection failings (The Guardian, 7 Jan 2013)

Liz Davies blog

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