For whose benefit? Social workers' understandings of children's behaviour

This study examines how social workers make sense of children’s behaviour, how that understanding guides interventions, and their ethical or human rights perspective in this area of their practice. Research data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with 29 social workers. All data was analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The study is divided into an introduction and six chapters. The first chapter reviews what might be at stake from a self-identity perspective when making causal attributions about behaviour, as well as the social workers’ professional context in understanding of children’s behaviour. The second presents the methods used in the study. Each of the three empirical chapters covers an aspect of the social workers’ responses: 1) possible explanations for a child’s behaviour and how they establish which one/s is the correct one for each child, 2) interventions to address children’s behaviour, and 3) ethical and human rights considerations. The final chapter concludes that the adult-led process of framing children’s behaviours is not a neutral one. Adults themselves have a vested interest. Behaviours selected for intervention appear to be those disruptive for the adult/s around the child, with less consideration paid to the child’s own experience. Further, some explanations allow adults to ignore their own potential responsibility for the child’s behaviour. Social workers showed moral distress at situations derived from the above; however, they rarely articulated this through an ethical/human rights perspective. The study suggests this could be due to another process of dislocation of responsibility, through emphasising organisational constraints and ‘unseeing’ ethical/human rights aspects of their practice. Whilst these processes may serve to sustain the social workers’ own professional identity, it also preserves the sociopolitical circumstances that constrain their practice. The study proposes as a way forward the reappropriation of agency and responsibility, not from an individualising understanding, but from a political responsibility perspective.