8. Shedding Light on the Expert Witness Role in Child Welfare Work

Since my move from social work practice to social work education in the mid-1990s, I have retained a small practice base as an expert witness and independent social worker in public law child protection cases. These cases primarily involve care proceedings taken by the Irish authorities (often referred to as social services) under child welfare legislation in cases of child maltreatment but have also included assessments of relatives (as potential carers) of Irish children in care in the English system.

In this chapter, I will describe my work in this role and how I have found a social constructionist perspective to be invaluable in illuminating not only the position I hold but also in expanding the potential of the work I do with families, courts, and child protection workers. A Foucauldian analysis of power relations (1979, 1980) drawing on the relationships between power, knowledge, and discourse is central to my effort to unsettle established practices and specifically the role of the “expert” witness, in order to open up possibilities for creative practice with families.

Along the way, I completed advanced training in mental health social work with children and families at the Maudsley Hospital in 1989, where my interest in systemic work and family therapy deepened. At the same time, I was introduced to solution-focused therapy (SFT) (de Shazer et al., 1986; de Shazer et al., 2007) through the work of Chris Iveson and colleagues at the Marlborough Family Service in London (George et al., 1990). Having previously co-worked with Chris and his colleagues at the Marlborough (we were all social work employees of the same local authority), I was already impressed by not only their very effective work but also their respectful and collaborative approach to clients. When they offered their first three-month training course in SFT in 1989, I jumped at the chance. Initially I struggled with some of the central concepts, especially the (at the time) radical notions of clients as experts on their own lives; of reframing the worker as facilitator and collaborator rather than problem-solver; and of the concept of “not-knowing,” being provisional in one’s assessments, and focusing more on the here and now and the unfolding of knowledge through dialogue and relationship than on the confirmation of suspicions or hypotheses. More of these five concepts in relation to court work later. For now, back to the journey.

It felt like a significant leap of faith to embrace this new approach. Having spent years in generic, community-based social work services, I was just finding my feet as an “expert” in family therapy and now this new idea had come along to tell me that I was not an expert—and furthermore, that thinking I was an expert was downright dangerous! I became more intrigued about the meaning of concepts, such as knowledge, therapy, change, expert, and power. Although SFT has its critics and can be viewed (particularly in its original formulation for clinic-based practice) as a formulaic, strategic approach far from the social justice mandate of “real” social work, for me the core concepts, especially the belief in people’s ability to build better lives, the hope that underlies the approach, and the emphasis on really listening to how clients experience their own lives was both humbling and exhilarating. SFT became, for me, a vehicle of change—an approach that fundamentally challenged my assumptions about, and ways of doing, social work. The change of heart that a social constructionist approach invoked for me is captured in the following excerpt from an earlier publication in which I tried to articulate what is needed on the part of the practitioner to embrace SFT:

This approach starts from the position that clients are the experts on their own lives, and that the best therapy is done when people work towards goals they have identified. . . . For practitioners to use this method, they need to feel comfortable with not knowing the answers. They need to feel okay about giving the client a lot of control, and they need to maintain an interested but open-minded curiosity about what might emerge in this piece of work with this client. They must overturn a lot of the received wisdom about social work: social workers do not need to know all the answers; the less we think we know the answers to other people’s problems, the better. Each situation is so uniquely different in any case that creativity is always required, rather than technical rationality (Walsh, 1997: 80).

Questions of epistemology and philosophy came later. My starting point was a growing awareness that for my work with clients in social work, solution-focused concepts and principles offered hope, release from a self-imposed impossible task (of always needing to be right or always able to solve problems), and a real sense of a different quality of engagement with clients. These were not insignificant advantages over existing expert practice methods, especially given my specialty in child welfare and mental health. For me, my work was energized and my confidence raised that change could happen. The burden was lifted because “SFBT suggests a much more equal partnership between client and therapist, one in which the client does as much or more ‘heavy lifting’ as the therapist. With this shift also can come a more relaxed connection to clients. It’s easier to be an interested and compassionate companion for someone on the road to change when you don’t feel burdened with the responsibility of their change” (de Shazer et al., 2007: 163–164, my emphasis).

For me, SFT is social constructionist in the very real sense that it is “based on the concept that reality is an intersubjective phenomenon, constructed in conversation among people” (Wetchler, 1996: 129). As de Shazer developed his ideas further, the influence of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work on language became more obvious, although de Shazer firmly states that Wittgensteinian philosophy is not a grand theory underlying SFT; rather he sees a parallel between Wittgenstein’s view that the philosophical problems that concerned him involved traps or knots that are inherent within language and the therapeutic process, which also contain such traps and knots, so that “therapists and clients are subject to falling into the same and similar traps, and to getting all tied up in the same kinds of knots . . . language must be used to resolve muddles and to get us out of the traps and knots inherent in language” (de Shazer et al., 2007: 101).

My interest in social constructionist and strengths-based approaches deepened after I had managed the major paradigm shift from expert-led to client-led practitioner (more of this later). This deepening interest led me to take on research studies into the momentum for change in the helping professions, which had built throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and the philosophical traditions of constructivism and postmodernism, which combined with social constructionism and underpinned the emerging new practices of narrative and solution-focused therapy. So far, this journey has led to a completed Ph.D. thesis on the Diffusion of Innovation—a case study of the introduction of solution-focused therapy to Irish social workers (Walsh, 2002); a first publication on how Irish child welfare workers were using it in practice (Walsh, 1997); and a continuing journey of discovery about both the value and limitations of experts and expert systems and the potential for therapeutic change in regulatory social work practice (Walsh, 2006; 2010). But what do SFT and social constructionism mean to me, and how are they linked?

Perception is the subjective and relational experiences that shape the meanings and understandings we develop about the world we inhabit and also shape the manner in which we engage with it and each other. A social constructionist viewpoint (Payne, 1997) accepts the varied experiences that different people may have and acknowledges the importance of subjective experience. A key distinction for me lies between constructionism/constructivism and positivism. Positivism is concerned with “formal scientific and intellectual knowledge”; social constructionism with “everyday knowing, the perceptions of reality that form our daily behavior and relations with each other” (Payne, 1999: 36). Iversen et al. (2005) make an important distinction between constructionism and constructivism in emphasizing that the former is essentially relational whereas the latter “locates the process of construction in the mind” (690). When applied to social work, social constructionist thinking “requires the inclusion of reality and self-consciousness . . . because social work activity does not merely seek to explain and account for but to interact and change the context of social constructions” (Payne, 1999: 36–37). For me, the possibility of interacting with—and changing—the context of social constructions is particularly inviting in my work at the interface of social work and legal systems.

Adopting a social constructionist mindset means that I remain wary of the tendency to label, to essentialize experiences and acts, and I try to avoid being reductionist in my thinking. It does not mean adopting a position whereby “anything goes” or that either cultural or moral relativism should shape the parameters of social work practice. Values and ethics of social work and the helping professions need to continue to inform practice. But stories, explanations, and understandings remain important, both as causal narratives and as subjective realities. It is, however, in the dialogical process that both client and professional narratives can be exposed and explored. A social constructionist viewpoint allows this to happen because there is no search for an ultimate truth (although this does not mean that there is no need for an ultimate understanding), rather there is an examination of perspectives, beliefs, and hopes within a respectful relationship. And this includes the need for ongoing reflection on the part of helpers, a self-consciousness that allows us to be reflexive, to consider how we impact others, how we present to others, how we are perceived, and that includes the context within which we engage, as well as our role and specific mandate. Remaining solution-focused but extending its reach into social work practice means making some adjustments. Parton and O’Byrne (2000) outline a social constructionist framework for social work practice which incorporates both solution-focused and narrative concepts and techniques. Their constructive approach “. . . emphasizes process, plurality of both knowledge and voice, possibility and the relational quality of knowledge . . . An ability to work with ambiguity and uncertainty both in terms of process and outcomes is key” (184).

For me, social constructionism crucially emphasizes language as communication which can at times restrict and oppress, but which can also expand and liberate. As noted by Hartman (1991), words create worlds. The philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein—best known for his work on language and its importance in shaping our worlds—influenced therapists as attention in psychology and the therapies became focused in the 1980s towards constructivism and an increased emphasis on how people create meaning systems and beliefs about their experiences. The “constructivist turn” began to influence family therapy in the 1980s (Family Therapy Networker, 1988; Burck, 1995) as the work of McNamee and Gergen (1992), Saleebey (1992), White and Epston (1990) also began to focus on the negative effects of language in pathologizing and labeling clients. Both narrative and solution-focused practitioners are interested in mining these concepts and releasing their potential for more empowering forms of practice based on dialogue, an exploration of narrative and meaning, and a search for more hopeful and positive frames of understanding and action. For me the vehicle into this new paradigm was initially that of the work of Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg, and their colleagues at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Their seminal article (de Shazer et al., 1986) in Family Process for some time accompanied me on every social work appointment.

In the early 1990s, solution-focused therapy (SFT) was part of a new generation of social constructionist-inspired models within the family therapy field. Applied to family therapy, I view social constructionism as “ideas, concepts and memories [as] arising from social interchange and mediated through language” (Hoffman, 1991: 8). SFT and social constructionism appear to fit each other, with the exception of the fairly prescriptive specific strategies used by the worker adopting a solution-focused approach. Although the metaphor of a conversation may now be used to denote the therapeutic encounter, to signal the changes towards a more equal relationship between client and worker, and to indicate that both have contributions to make, there is a limit to how far the metaphor can be taken if the worker is also to fulfill his or her professional and ethical obligation to offer some expertise in how problems may be solved or solutions constructed. Not only in SFT but in its closest relative within the social construction field—narrative therapy—specific tools are used to help clients make changes. Tools include the Miracle Question, scaling and exception-finding questions, and externalizing the problem and identifying “unique outcomes.” In accepting that social workers use influence to help people to change and use these “tools” to help them to do so, I think that we need to explicitly restrict the extent to which the metaphor of “conversation” can be used to depict the helping encounter, especially when workers have legal mandates which can restrict freedom and choice.¹ Nonetheless, at this intersection between influence and change, I find a social constructionist mindset most useful, and as I will explain further in relation to my work in court systems, the question of who is expert in what way about what matters becomes a central debate in the work that I do, and how I approach it.

Limiting the use of the metaphor of “conversation” does not preclude holding the position that clients are expert on their own lives; rather it allows for an acknowledgement that professional helpers do also hold (and use) expertise and that both forms of knowledge are important elements in co-constructing change. Similarly the concept of “not-knowing” used by de Shazer (and therapists of other persuasions) has been developed further to embrace the notion of the “expertise of knowing and not-knowing” (Gaiswinkler and Roessler, 2009). Following an action research project with social workers trained to use the solution-focused approach with homeless clients in Austria, Gaiswinkler and Roessler used qualitative analysis of video recordings of social worker–client interactions to differentiate between different forms of knowing and not-knowing:

There are two kinds of expertise that are of vital importance in social work; on the one hand, social workers must have expert knowledge about, for example, legal questions, claims procedures, responsibilities of agencies or further relevant matters concerning these agencies. This kind of expertise is generally called “expert knowledge”, or, as we call it, “expertise of knowing”. However, this expertise of knowing is not enough: Social workers are also experts in goal-oriented counselling, which is a communicative expertise we suggest could be called “expertise of not knowing” or “expertise of communication in the alternative paradigm (2009: 221–222).

These Viennese researchers found both sets of expertise in successful social work interventions (using client feedback on what was most useful). They conclude that both forms of expertise are also necessary to develop a good working alliance. “The expertise of not-knowing has to build the framework, and the expertise of knowing (specialist knowledge) is guided by the expertise of not-knowing” (223). This very useful distinction has a resonance in the work I do carrying out assessments for courts.

The social constructionist emphasis on the importance of language is developed and actively mined in SFT through the use of several interventions, including the technique of reframing. Reframing is a familiar term to therapists as it predates the development of SFT, but it has been less developed in social work practice. Described as “an opportunity to describe a situation or behavior from a different, more hopeful and optimistic perspective” (Trevithick, 2000: 130), it is often used to shift stuck or negative perceptions or behaviors through changing the meaning ascribed to them. In technical terms, this is achieved through “re-wording” a set of facts and placing them in a different context or frame in order to change the entire meaning (Trevithick, 2000). In practical use, it is more of an art than a technique—an art that relates back to the Wittgensteinian concept of using language to free ourselves from the traps and knots that language-use creates. Taking an example from a piece of work I carried out as a child protection social worker with a young mother of two children who was at risk of losing care of her children due to her problems resisting the powerful hold her incestuous father maintained over her, it was possible to alter her perception of herself from that of a passive victim into a person with agency and choices. The reframed goal for our work of helping her to achieve an independent existence apart from her father was that of “practising staying strong” (Walsh, 2006). By drawing on concepts of social construction combined with a solution-focused future orientation and belief in her ability to make change, the subtly reworded goal was one she could subscribe to without needing to reject all of her past emotional ties to her father. Reframing, used respectfully as a social constructionist intervention, brings alive the assertion that in helping encounters, there is a wide-ranging repertoire of possible meanings which worker and client can explore and develop in order to create new understandings and possibilities.

Solution-focused work is probably distinctive in its heavy emphasis on the future—plans, hopes, and dreams. The worker concentrates on helping clients work out first how to envision their preferred future and then how to build on small steps of change towards it. Underpinning it is an essentially optimistic view of people’s capacity to make positive changes in their lives, and that change is not only possible but inevitable. This connects with the Buddhist notion that change is always happening (de Shazer et al., 2007).

The value of solution-focused thinking and techniques has for me stretched beyond direct (or explicit) therapeutic work with clients into a broader frame of reference that now underpins my work in education, training, and consultation. In my work as an expert witness, I tend to use reframing with both professional workers and client families as an antidote to the often stigmatizing and negative perceptions that develop through immersion in an adversarial legal system. I might explore with client families how they can help child welfare workers “do their job” as opposed to listening in silence to them depicting individual workers in negative terms. I will reflect back overly negative summaries of parental deficits in less loaded terms to workers, perhaps by declaring my amazement at how a parent has continued to struggle to do “their best” for the children despite facing adversities x, y, and z, and how well they are coping with the essentially shaming experience of having official interventions into their private family lives. Iversen et al. (2005), in their analysis of assessment using a constructionist critique, remind us of how often “assessment tools carry an overarching and inherent emphasis on client ‘problems,’” thus prioritizing a deficit-based discourse as opposed to a language of “potentials” (695) and cast the practitioner as a technical “expert.” Within the narrow risk-focused confines of contemporary child welfare practice, this tendency is amplified; once court proceedings begin, the emphasis is on winning the case on technical points. Contextualized knowledge is not often valued here as a means to winning the case! An expert witness who works within a constructionist frame can, however, work to reinsert it in the final reckoning.

Michel Foucault, the celebrated French philosopher, challenges us to look beyond the importance of language itself to the relationships between power, knowledge, language, and discourse. His ideas have been drawn on by many to highlight the linkages between expert knowledge and power, regulatory practices and systems of thought in modern societies, and the capacity of discourse (institutionalized and/or accepted ways of thinking and doing that are communicated through language and practice) to create new forms of control and surveillance. One discourse that for me has been of enduring interest is that of “child protection,” a form of practice which emerged and developed into the dominant frame for social work with children and families in the United Kingdom and Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a subject I have written about (Walsh, 1999), as my experience has been that it has developed into a particularly punitive and repressive ideology which fundamentally changed the nature of the contract between social workers and families in need to the detriment of both. While it is true that “power and power relations are an inevitable feature of professional social work as an expert strategy” and that “at a most basic level, there is the power of the profession to use language to define social problems in a certain manner” (Skehill, 1997: 193), it is the discursive reframing of child welfare social work as “child protection” that risks pitting workers against parents and carers. Not that I believe that social workers should never intervene formally when children are exposed to abuse and neglect, but rather that authoritative work is possible within a more respectful and constructive frame than that allowed by the contemporary child protection ideology currently governing practices in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Child protection practice is arguably one of the strongest regulatory forms of social work practice in modern Western societies, and one of its key features is a heavy reliance on the legal system to adjudicate between families and professionals and an increase in legal regulations governing the relationship between social worker and family. Legal proceedings taken under child welfare legislation, in countries and contexts where an adversarial court system is in place, can place parents and social workers in diametrically opposed corners, and locate the child as a passive object to be fought over, rather than an active participant in the process. Necessary as state intervention sometimes is, both to protect children from immediate harm of injury or abuse, and/or to ameliorate the effects of longer-term neglect or emotional abuse, the impact of current child protection systems “underlies the centrality of social workers in providing social assessments of ‘risk’ and ‘dangerousness’. . . . [and] decisions in child care are now carried out in a more legalized context where the need for forensic evidence is prioritised” (Parton, 1996: 11).

With the shift to a legal arena for the determination of what is in a child’s best interests, the complex nuances and provisionality of social work assessments can be lost in the search for certainty and in the mandate to establish a case that justifies official intervention, that identifies harm and future risk, and that proposes action to manage the risk and prevent future harm. In this recasting of the social work role much is lost: “No longer are social workers constituted as caseworkers drawing on their therapeutic skills in human relationships, but as care managers assessing need and risk and operationalising packages of care where notions of monitoring and review are central” (Parton, 1996: 12). While it is also important that social workers exercising such strong statutory powers as removing children from their families are accountable and need to justify their actions to independent bodies such as the courts, too often the adversarial court system involves a search for those to blame but also often includes a demand for complete compliance on the part of the parents or carers. Given these conditions, the risks of positions becoming polarized and of all involved reaching an impasse are high. In such situations, calls are often made for an independent assessment to be carried out—for an expert witness to be recruited to advise the court. So, can social workers and other professionals operating in the role of expert witness recast the die and use their position to open up, if possible, potential “win-win” situations?

Many of the provisions of Irish child care law are similar to those of the British system, and the role of the expert witness is one such example. Solicitors (also known as attorneys) representing either parent, the child welfare service, or the child can make a request to have an independent assessment carried out; the judge may also initiate such a request. The expert witness is asked to carry out an assessment or an examination (if of a medical nature) or offer an opinion based on a letter of instruction, which must “clearly set out the context in which the expert’s opinion is sought and define carefully the specific questions the expert is being asked to address” (Pizzey and Davis, 1995: 58).

So far, so crystal clear! You are not alone if you are now thinking that this leaves the role rather broad and yet tightly specified. Yet, the ways in which this role is embodied and the manner in which individuals choose to enact these responsibilities are manifold. One consequence of the increasing legalization of child welfare has been the cleaving of assessment from intervention; the fear that if one were to follow therapeutic principles during an assessment, evidence would be contaminated. Yet, happily there are increasingly voices of dissent, resisting this rigid practice (Mantle et al, 2008; Ruegger and Neil, 2009). Many skilled practitioners recognize that in the crisis of public intervention into private family life, of removal of children from their homes, there can also often be opportunity for change. “It is our experience that the event of care proceedings renders parents more amenable to change than they are before or after due to the crisis they produce through the threat to the integrity and the very existence of the family unit. . . . It is our premise that access to resources at a time when families are psychologically available offers a unique opportunity for a variety of effective therapeutic interventions to be employed” (Ruegger and Neil, 2009: 142).

Some of the questions I ask myself when embarking on a court-ordered assessment are as follows: Do I need to amplify and consolidate the child protection expert system unquestioningly, participate as another guard on the panopticon of child protection? (And sometimes this is the case where extreme dangerousness exists in families, and there appears no feasible hope for change in the foreseeable future.) Or can I through the adoption of a social constructionist perspective examine the seemingly objective “facts” of this case to show how human subjectivity has imposed itself on those facts—to highlight how positions of perspective and power have shaped certain interpretations into privileged facts while other versions and views have remained submerged or subordinated? Furthermore, how can I do this while remaining true to my own expertise and wisdom from years of practice as a social worker with children and families? How do I hold onto my own ethical perspective and acknowledge it without becoming yet another actor in this scenario with too much to lose if I am proved wrong?

Let’s take a case and illustrate how social constructionism can inform court-ordered assessments.² Baby Sean was taken into care by social services at the age of six months following a diagnosis of non-accidental injury by the local pediatric hospital. His mother brought him to the local general practitioner and was then referred on to the hospital after his arm “cracked” while she changed his nappy that afternoon. She had just returned from work; Sean and his four-year-old sister Nicola had been in the care of their father all day. X-rays taken at the hospital indicated that there were three healing fractures involving both shoulder joints and the right lower leg, possibly all of the same age. Further investigations took place while Sean remained in the hospital. A child protection case conference was called and, in the absence of any satisfactory explanation from the parents regarding the source of these injuries, non-accidental injury was suspected. The parents agreed to place Sean in foster care (with daily access) while social services and the police continued to assess and investigate the situation.

Some four months later, another case conference confirmed physical abuse and made a decision not to return Sean to his parents because “the perpetrator has not been identified” and so risk to the baby remained. Additional expert medical opinions on the injuries confirmed the original doctors’ views: one declaring that “The events were highly suggestive of inflicted injury”; the other that “The appearance of three separate fractures in a child of this age is suspicious and raises the strong possibility of non-accidental injury.” Both medical experts also discounted the possibility that vigorous play (for example, being swung by the arms and one leg) could account for the injuries, a possible explanation which the parents had forwarded. Underlying causes or vulnerabilities such as brittle bone disease were also ruled out.

The situation at this point appeared to reach an impasse, with Sean remaining in foster care for a period of thirteen months and social services refusing to return him yet unable to elaborate how his parents could satisfy them as to his future safety. In desperation, the parents’ legal advisors applied to the courts for his return home, and an independent social work assessment was requested and granted. A guardian ad litem was also appointed to report on Sean’s best interests.

Following a short but intensive assessment involving joint and separate interviews with both parents, observations of family time in the home both with their older child and in the foster home with Sean and his sister, and reviews of all documentation and interviews with the social workers involved, it appeared that a stalemate existed in relation to this young child’s future. The impasse had been reached because of the weight of the medical expert opinions, the case conference finding of confirmed physical abuse, and the position taken by social services that in the absence of a “confession” and identification of “a perpetrator,” they would not take the risk of returning Sean to his parents. Yet, the social workers, foster parents, public health nurses, school teachers, GP, and all professionals involved with the family agreed that there had been no concerns before Sean’s hospitalization or since regarding the parents’ capacity to care for their other child, nor had Sean’s care in itself been of concern. The parents had continued to comply fully with all that was demanded of them by social services, they visited Sean daily, and they remained actively distressed by his continuing absence from their care.

Both the guardian ad litem and I reached the conclusion that there was no significant reason for Sean to remain out of home, especially given the family’s willingness to comply with any monitoring or ongoing treatment required. Sean was returned to the care of his family some six weeks after the initial court hearing, and he continues to do well in their care.

In this piece of work, a rigorous assessment of the documentation about the original injuries and causes of concern was coupled with an assessment of present family functioning, parenting styles, and an evaluation of family dynamics. Crucially, this not only concentrated on elements of risk and dangerousness but also incorporated a more holistic assessment of not only the deficits but also the strengths in both the environment and the family (Cowger, Anderson, and Snively, 2006). This assessment highlighted and developed the extent to which this family demonstrated resilience in their handling of this situation (Benard, 2006) as well as a steadfast commitment towards their child and a persistence in seeking his return home.

The medical opinions, while they voiced considerable concern about the possibility of non-accidental injury, were not definitive. Uncertainty remained as to how Sean had received these injuries (there had been a large family gathering over a weekend in the time-frame when the injuries occurred, when Sean had been in the care of older teenage cousins, unsupervised). It was an isolated incident without precedence or sequel and one which had occurred in the context of an otherwise caring and well-functioning family. In stating this position quite strongly in my report, in acknowledging that uncertainty would remain about how Sean had been hurt, in accepting that there may be no answers about this, it was possible to avoid the danger of making a judgment about the injury itself. By detailing the areas on which there was no evidence of problems usually associated with child abuse or violence (history of violence or anger management problems; alcohol or drug misuse; mental health problems; discordant relationships), and also by detailing the nature and extent of the positives (both parents with childhood and adolescent histories unmarked by extreme trauma or disruption; both parents with steady work records; strong extended family supports on the maternal side; strong positive parenting skills and practices; full cooperation with social services and foster carers), it was possible to shift the focus from the past to the future. What now? became the central issue to be resolved, rather than What happened?

The judge found himself freed up to move the focus to Sean’s overall welfare and the increasingly detrimental impact of remaining in foster care at such a young age, especially when there were clear signs that Sean was beginning to attach to his foster carers and increasingly confused about the different adult carers in his life. Social services were also freed up to accept that a return home needed to happen and to do so quickly.

A solution-focused approach with both family and social workers enabled a shift in thinking away from past risk and towards future plans, and in particular the construction of a plan for ongoing monitoring when Sean returned home. Both Sean’s parents and the social workers were able to develop a picture of how to best handle the transition home and to support each other in this goal. An analysis of the situation informed by social constructionism allowed for an acceptance of the different perspectives the professionals and the family members held on the situation. Sean’s parents could understand that the social workers would continue to have worries for some time, and so Sean’s parents accepted their role in needing to reassure them and accept their involvement for some time. An appreciation of the importance of language and the value of reframing helped in articulating the real concerns felt in a more hopeful and future-focused way. The goal for the parents became one of building and demonstrating safe parenting practices for Sean and his sibling. The goal for the workers became one of helping to rebuild these parents’ confidence in their parenting abilities. In my report to the court, I was able to uncover and highlight hidden areas of competence and strength such as the parents’ strong relationship, which had withstood the stress of a long period of time separated from their son and under suspicion for child abuse; their initiative in making a referral themselves to a local service to receive assistance on their parenting practices; and their maturity in accepting the various social work assessments and interventions, despite not agreeing with the need for them all.

Finally, a Foucauldian analysis allowed for an appreciation of how child protection practices operate as disciplinary forces with an unequal gaze: an appreciation of the supremacy of the medical discourse and expert medical opinion and an awareness of the need to counteract this with an equally strong evidence-based opinion, in this case relating to the risk factors most strongly associated with physical abuse (and their complete absence in this situation). In addition, the reframing of the core task as being as related to child welfare as it was to child protection enabled a shift back to a focus on this child’s overall welfare.

Invariably, your cases come with a large bundle of files, records, reports, and observations. In the rush and haste of current practice realities, social work students have sometimes told me that they “had no time” to read case files before meeting with clients; practitioners sometimes tell me the same. In such ways, workers risk adopting a surface approach to practice, denounced by Howe (1996) as a historical. “Clients arrive, in effect, without a history; their past is no longer of interest. It is their present and future performance which matters. Present behaviour. . . . is now assessed in terms of future expectations. The lack of depth in the social work assessment is therefore both spatial and temporal” (89). Yet, if I am to “make sense” of an injury, an accident, a history of alleged neglect or abuse, I need to know the meaning of the events, of the reactions to events, of how past experience has helped to shape these perceptions. This does not mean an essentialist approach, as will be explained later. Constructionist ideas privilege the importance of both historical and contextual elements of knowledge-construction and attempt to “elucidate the sociohistorical context and ongoing social dynamic of descriptions, explanations and accountings of reality” (Witkin, 1990: 38, quoted in Iversen et al., 2005: 694). Written representations of our clients’ lives are especially powerful because they endure over time. Once the author of such a representation is no longer at hand, control is lost on the future interpretation of written “facts,” and no mediating influence is possible.

If I don’t understand the directions I receive from a judge or attorneys in a case, or if I think I am being asked to address the impossible, I return for clarification. Sometimes, such letters of instruction are framed in difficult if not impossible terms: “Please advise the court on the likelihood of the child being injured or harmed in the future.” At times, it is such a search for an impossible certainty that boxes both social workers and parents/carers into rigid straitjacket solutions, when instead a search for a reframed realistic and more achievable goal may be successful in finding a new formula for moving forward. So, for example, “Yes I am willing to advise the court on the child’s welfare, in the context of potential stressors, supports, and potential for change in this family” may be a reframe of the initial request outlined above, which social workers, parents, and the courts will be happy to see addressed. Iversen et al. (2005) suggest that using a constructionist lens, assessment tools are capable of “transcending their own origins” (699) to develop transformative outcomes. One such is that of challenging existing realities. By reframing impossible demands for certainty, it is possible to challenge the presumption that such certainty exists.

In several situations of suspected non-accidental injury, I have been struck by the ways in which the demands of the child protection expert system stretch social workers’ assessments beyond what is realistically answerable. For example, you may have a child who has a broken limb, a child who is too young to injure herself in this way, or a child who is maybe not yet walking; you may have two or three or more adults who all had care of this child during the days before the injury is diagnosed in the time-frame that the doctors determine was the time it was inflicted. Who injured the child? In cases where it is an isolated incident, where finding the culprit is literally anyone’s guess, instead of relying on prejudice, hunches, and unreliable interpretations of eye-contact, body language, or other nebulous “evidence,” I will declare it: I do not know. Instead of over-reaching either my level of expertise or the “facts” as they are known, in my reports, I emphasize the unknown. This, in my experience, can free up the judge, lawyers, and child welfare workers to look beyond the isolated injury; it can also free up parents and carers to talk about what stresses they are under that they would like to address in the future, what help they need, and what changes they will make, while accepting that a level of monitoring and supervision will be necessary for a time because “nobody knows.” But instead of this declaration paralyzing everybody, its very articulation can help people to move on. In so doing, it is possible to work towards realizing new realities, a second form of transformative outcome identified by Iversen et al. (2005) as a potential outcome from use of a constructionist approach.

Like any other parent, I come to this work with some pretty strong opinions of my own on what are acceptable and unacceptable parenting practices. These can be hard to set aside. Rather than pretend that I come to the role as a neutral, scientific, objective, value-free observer, I will declare this position and make clear what is opinion and what is “fact,” based on observations, conversations, and beliefs. Some facts and opinions will be based on direct experience and some on professional literature. In addition, How does this family work? is the central question that directs my engagement with every family. Taking a position of informed curiosity, I explore this question with all family members, not only the nominated responsible parent (most often the mother or female carer is cast in this role). I also explore different meanings of family and family life with the family group, or a parenting couple, or a parent and child if they are interested in engaging and working with me on this. In this way, both assessment and creative possibilities can co-exist. My assessment may raise some new ideas, some changed meanings, and some potential for change. “In bringing new realities into being, dialogue may be focused on new resources, images, metaphors or narratives, each serving as a lattice for alternative courses of action” (Iversen et al., 2005: 702). In the work with Sean’s family, cited earlier, it was important not to gloss over some adverse family circumstances which Sean’s father had experienced but to consider these in the light of his commitment to his own children and his desire to make a better life for them. Using the theme of how resilience can be developed through the experience of overcoming adversity, it was also possible to build in suggestions for further attention to these experiences with the goal of helping both parents work more closely together in their parenting.

Mantle et al. (2008) describe how, in their British research with court-appointed welfare officers, the primary report-writing function was often accompanied by actual interventions where it appeared, to the individuals involved, such interventions were warranted. So, too, with the role of the expert witness. While the primary function may be to advise the court on the best possible course of action for the child or children involved, this assessment is best viewed as an intervention in itself and one which can therefore confirm and/or reinforce existing positions and perceptions or which can potentially reframe some of the supposed certainties to create new possibilities. Remaining mindful both of time frames (and the need for children not to be left “waiting” unnecessarily) and of role definition and boundaries does not preclude also seizing opportunities to renegotiate, reframe, and reformulate both the extent of the issues involved and possible alternative solutions.

Constructionist ideas give voice to this potential in recognizing that assessment is essentially dialogic in nature: “Constructionist texts also invite us to see the assessment device not as an instrument for finding, but for making, i.e., not as a means of determining what is the case, but of creating visions of our world.” (Iversen et al., 2005: 703, original emphasis). In my work in the case example cited earlier, in assessing Sean’s best interests and welfare, I was able to create an alternative view of Sean’s situation and possible solutions by broadening the focus from the issue of protection to wider concerns about welfare and long-term interests.

It is surprising how often families do not know what is contained in official reports until they appear in court on the date of the hearing. This should not happen. Sharing the report with the family beforehand is only one small way in which you can use your dominant position in a less oppressive way. Sometimes reports do not contain the recommendations that the family would wish; sometimes I have not accepted their views and proposals for change; but I will still meet with them beforehand and let them know what is in it and I will share my thinking with them. When there is strong opposition to my proposals, I will redraft and leave the final decision to the judge: in such cases, I will make clear the pros and cons of different courses of action using care in my choice of language. If I pose the dilemmas as such, pointing out that “On the one hand, this could be tried but. . . . On the other hand, this could be put in place. . . .” a subtle challenge is also taking place to the notion that there is only one correct course of action; that there is a guarantee of a particular outcome or of a child’s future, either remaining in the care system or being returned home or to relatives, is a one-dimensional decision.

Continuous dialogue is the third and final form of transformative action that Iversen et al. (2005) identify. In the role of expert witness, there are three potential sites for such collaborative inquiries to take place: the family and child, the professional system, and the court. For all: “As new constructions are grasped, and their implications played out in practice, they now become candidates for ‘the real’” (Iversen et al., 2005: 704). In the case example outlined earlier, once the possibility was raised that Sean could be returned home despite the absence of an answer (to the question, What happened?), the social workers became energized around how this might work out in practice. A momentum developed, and it appeared as if they were freed to bring their own doubts about the need for Sean to remain in care out into the open. Hence, by the time of the court hearing, they were enthusiastic advocates for this course of action.

HAMLET: What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?

GUILDENSTERN: Prison, my lord!

HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.

ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one.

HAMLET: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.

ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord.

HAMLET: Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me, it is a prison.

Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2, 239–251

Adopting a social constructionist framework while working as an expert witness in child welfare cases has for me many advantages over a form of thinking which would have me carry out my function in a less critical and reflective manner. “Rather than branding assessment as an inherently reactionary/modernist process, a constructionist alliance enables assessment to become a collaborative inquiry into transformative possibilities” (Iversen et al., 2005: 704). In a nutshell, social constructionist thinking gives me flexibility, allows me to set aside unanswerable or unhelpful questions, allows me to reframe concerns in ways that promote joint work rather than conflictual positions, and allows me to search for new solutions before legal interventions restrict these options. Social constructionist ideas do not in themselves address the complex economic, environmental, psychological, and interpersonal factors which contribute to problems of child maltreatment, but they can provide a strategy for rendering less rigid the demands of expert-led child protection and legal systems.