ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the changes afoot in child protection social work, link these to professional identities and show how resistance to 'risk thinking' in narrow and punitive ways may offer an antidote of sorts, to help promote the shared values required for professional identities to be re-imagined into a coherent form of the 'professional'. The broader political environment impacts on the identities of child protection social workers. Professional identities are developed within a particular social milieu that relies on the development and maintenance of social capital. An emerging child-focused orientation, couched in terms of children's long-term well-being, often coalesces with social investment policy logic. The problem for social workers is that professional communication about risk, within child-focused–social investment context, tends to be couched in rather narrow thinking about available options for neo-liberal child-client. Understanding the institutional context helps people to examine ways that political tropes play out via institutional mechanisms to produce risk constructs in child protection contexts.
