ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at child welfare workers’ work and proposes a critical refraining of child welfare practice. The study found that the current practice of child welfare harms clients as much as it helps them. This harm comes about despite the work, sincerity, and dedication of child welfare workers and the cooperation of the children and families who are child welfare’s clients. Child welfare practice merely documented individual failure rather than addressed the causes of abuse and neglect. Within the bureaucratic non-differentiation of child welfare practice at City Office, Indian children were virtually lost among the caseloads. The wider policy context of Indian self-determination appeared to have no place in child welfare practice at City Office. The way public child welfare work at City Office was organised – high case loads, excessive paperwork, personal danger, unsympathetic courts – produced extra pressures that tarnished and frustrated the work.
