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).

ing 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