‘She is not coping’: Risk Assessment and Claims of Deficit in Social Work

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus our discussion on the professional site of statutory child protection and show how a discourse of deficit is consequential to the framing of risk in child neglect situations. To illustrate our points, we provide case study evidence from one social worker’s account of a child neglect case. We use an ethnomethodological discourse approach (Garfinkel 1964, 1967, 1996) to analyse the social worker’s written risk assessment of a child neglect situation. Risk Assessment Reports are written accounts of how the institutional member, in this case the social worker, perceives risk, and are one example among the many other types of reporting practices evident in statutory child protection (see Hall et al. 2006; Munro 2004, 2008). We argue that the analysis of such an account can therefore be revealing of how the risk situation is constructed by the institutional member, in this case a social worker (Garfinkel 1967; Hall et al. 2006; Sarangi & Roberts 1995).