Lunch and Learn

Cultures of Listening in Crisis:
Introducing ‘dark listening’ - a participatory research method to enhance professional listening to children and adults in situations of need or risk

12 November 2024, 12.00pm - 1.30pm

Speaker: Johanna Motzkau, The Open University

Despite decades of research and improvements to UK child protection practice, and repeated declarations to learn from past mistakes, there still are frequent cases where child protection has gone wrong, so much so that it has been described as in permanent crisis (Munro 2017; Parton 2014; Hood et al, 2020; Maglajlic and Ioakimidis, 2020; MacAlister, 2022). Simultaneously the media and politicians are quick to blame individual practitioners/agencies, thereby undermining professional confidence, while long-term austerity has put a significant strain on agencies’ resources. This was shown to affect how effectively practitioners can listen (Turney and Ruch, 2018) and act on what they hear (Motzkau & Lee 2022), indicating this to be a ‘crisis of listening’ within politics/society as a whole, rather than the result of individual failure. The research project introduced in this talk is led by Dr Johanna Motzkau (The Open University) in collaboration with Prof. Michelle Lefevre (University of Sussex) and aims to better understand practices and experiences of listening in child protection, to find a way out of this crisis.

The quality of professional listening matters because less powerful, marginalised or vulnerable people are often either misheard, misinterpreted or not heard at all (Lefevre, 2018). For this research we start from the premise that listening is not merely an aspect of auditory perception or a communication skill. Instead, we use the term ‘cultures of listening’ (Motzkau & Lee, 2022) to capture the idea that different contexts, practices, policies, cultures, traditions, histories, backgrounds and values together shape: (a) how practitioners engage and communicate with children, young people and adults in different roles and contexts; (b) what practitioners can hear and how they make sense of it; and (c) what they feel they can do with what they have heard, including how they record and share information within and across agencies. The project is also interested in how these complex interactions and processes happen against a backdrop of practitioners’ personal experiences of working within a rapidly changing social/political world, where there are ongoing cuts to services, and media reporting focuses on potential failures within practice.

The project develops a participatory art based method called ‘dark listening’, which is designed to give child protection practitioners an opportunity to reflect on their experiences with listening and being listened to within practice, and to anonymously share and discuss such ideas/experiences. The aim is to better understand why, over the past decades, and despite extensive reform efforts to improve practice, social work continues to face repeated crises of listening; and how to change this.

The method of ‘Dark Listening’ is inspired by ‘Audio Obscura’, an artwork by the British poet and artist Lavinia Greenlaw (2011). She defines dark listening as ‘listening to what you cannot hear’, a way of attending to “the point at which we start to make sense of things”. To make us aware of this point/instant, she uses Audio Obscura as an “attempt to arrest and investigate that moment, to separate its components and test their effects” (ibid, 2011, p. 7). By listening to examples from ‘Audio Obscura’ the talk will explain how the method of dark listening is an intervention that temporarily suspends/arrests participants’ sense making and thereby alerts them to the cultures of listening they employ/are embedded, and potentially trapped in, opening them up to scrutiny and transformation (Motzkau & Lee 2022).

During this session you will:

• be encouraged to think about what you do with what you hear;
• consider listening in a dynamic fashion, as a process, and as related to sense making as well as to actions we anticipate/plan to take as a result of what we hear;
• learn about the idea of ‘cultures of listening’ and how it opens up a dynamic understanding of sense making, communication and action in complex high stakes multiagency practice;
• think about listening in child protection via the artwork ‘Audio Obscura’;
• be introduced to the art based participatory method of method ‘dark listening’;
• get the opportunity to discuss all aspects of listening, comment on the research project and consider participating in it.

For more background reading please follow the link below to this open access publication: Mo​tzkau, J., & Lee, N. (2022). Cultures of listening: psycholog​y, resonance, justice. ​Re​vie​w ​of General Psychology, 10.1177/10892680221077999, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10892680221077999

Lunch and Learn

Introduction to Transitional Safeguarding

5th November 2024, 12.00pm - 13.30pm

Speaker: Dez Holmes, National Children's Bureau and Research in Practice

In this session participants will:

• Explore what the concept of Transitional Safeguarding is, and what it is not
• Consider messages from research, practice wisdom and expertise from lived experience to understand why Transitional Safeguarding is needed
• Understand Transitional Safeguarding as an issue of whole-system change, and systems leadership (not an intervention to be ‘rolled out’)
• Hear how some local areas are trying to develop a Transitional Safeguarding response
• Reflect on how Transitional Safeguarding can transform how young people can be better supported to be and feel safe as they make the transition to adulthood.

Lunch and Learn

Equal Protection from Physical Punishment: How calling for legal change can improve children’s health and child protection practice

30th October 2024, 12.00pm - 13.30pm

Speakers: Professor Andrew Rowland & Lizzie Fussey

Chair: Steve Myers

In this session, the RCPCH will outline how they developed their landmark report ‘Equal protection from assault in England and Northern Ireland: Prohibiting physical punishment of all children’. Attendees will hear about the existing legal landscape, the challenges this presents to child protection, and the findings from the RCPCH’s evidence review on the health impacts of physical punishment. The RCPCH will share recent development in this work, opportunities to get involved with future projects, and background information about the RCPCH’s wider child protection strategy. Professor Andrew Rowland will share how learnings from the Equal Protection report can be translated into Child Protection Medical Reports where physical punishment is suspected.

Attendees will have the opportunity to learn:

• How we define ‘Equal Protection from Physical Punishment’ in a child protection context
• What the evidence says about the health impacts of the use of physical punishment of children
• What the law says about physical punishment in all four nations of the UK and the international picture
• How to use the evidence basis in this space to inform Child Protection Medical Reports