ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the issues youth raised concerning their relationships with social workers. Good social workers must understand and explicate, both for themselves and for clients, the contradictions, tensions, pulls, and struggles that arise from the grounds of their practice. Interactions between children and youth in care and child protection social workers are accomplished in an interface that joins local to extra local organisations and informal to formal relations, and which as a result generates tension and irremediable contradictions. Humility demands accepting successes and failures as rooted in the realities of a world which in its complexity and range is beyond the control and authority of child protection practice. It follows then, that child protection social work demands taking up the problems and issues of people in their families, not just as they are presented, but always and irremediably as interpreted through organisational and professional orders.
