Professor Harry Ferguson explores why children are sometimes ‘invisible’ in social workers’ home visits
Child death inquiries have uncovered a range of organisational and professional shortcomings, including how children have occasionally become ‘invisible’ in child safeguarding proceedings.
Professor Harry Ferguson of the University of Birmingham has conducted extensive ethnographic research in which he has shadowed social workers to explore the reasons why this may occur. Critical of the notion of the ‘invisible child’ he argues that children must be ‘held’ to ensure that their needs can be fully met and appropriately safeguarded.
A qualified social worker, Harry has been an academic for 31 years and has conducted many empirical research projects into social work, child protection and child welfare practices. Over the past decade he has used ethnographic methods of participant observation to get close to practice to find out what social workers actually do, and how they interact with service users. His books include Child Protection Practice (Palgrave Macmillan) and Harry is in demand as a speaker and trainer to both academic and practitioner audiences across the UK and beyond.
In this episode, we discuss one of his papers which was the most read in the British Journal of Social Work for three and half years and still gets about a thousand views per month. The full text can be accessed here:
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