This Lunch and Learn session will share the findings of my article recently published in Child Abuse Review: Cultural Sensitivity vs. Child Protection: The Opposing Pressures Failing Charedi Children. The presentation explores how well-intentioned efforts to respect cultural and faith contexts can sometimes conflict with child protection imperatives, leaving children at risk of harm.

Drawing on fictionalised case examples informed by recurring themes in professional and lived experience, I will examine the barriers Charedi children face when disclosing sexual abuse, and the role community structures can play in restricting their safety. The session will highlight how policies built around “cultural sensitivity” can inadvertently silence children and reinforce systemic failings.

Participants will:
- Gain insights into the specific safeguarding challenges faced by children in the Charedi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) community.
- Reflect on the tension between cultural sensitivity and child protection, and how this plays out in practice.
- Consider practical ways practitioners and policymakers can centre children’s rights while working with faith and minority communities.

Yehudis Goldsobel is a safeguarding specialist, researcher, and policy leader with over a decade of experience in child protection, sexual violence, and victim services. She is the Founder and former Chief Executive of Migdal Emunah, a pioneering support organisation for Jewish victims of sexual abuse and has chaired the Metropolitan Police’s Independent Advisory Group on Rape and Serious Sexual Offences.

Her professional background spans senior roles across policing, local government, and the voluntary sector, including advising Police and Crime Commissioners on safeguarding, crime, and victim policy, as well as embedding a Child First approach within the Criminal Justice System. Yehudis guest lectures on safeguarding and minority communities at London Metropolitan University and has recently completed an MA in Domestic Violence and Sexual Abuse at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Her recent publication in Child Abuse Review — Cultural Sensitivity vs. Child Protection: The Opposing Pressures Failing Charedi Children — highlights the risks posed when cultural sensitivity and safeguarding come into conflict and introduces a critical perspective on protecting children in faith-based settings.

A digital download from this Lunch and Learn session.

Greater attention is now being paid to the adverse effects of vicarious trauma on individual practitioners working with highly vulnerable children and families, particularly within health and social work.  Questions have also been raised by senior practitioners within the UK-based AoCPP (Association of Child Protection Professionals) and other professional forums about the possible affects of vicarious trauma on practitioner’s decision-making capacity but also to consider the impact of ongoing work with the family where one family member is the perpetrator of harm.  AoCPP therefore decided to obtain a ‘snapshot’ of vicarious trauma and its possible effects amongst UK-based child protection professionals, as the basis for further study.

The session will allow exploration of the above and reflect the results allowing participants to discuss the responses and we wish to discuss limitations and next steps in repeating survey of AoCPP members and gain a wider understanding of other wider multi-disciplinary professionals working with vulnerable children.  Session seeks to reflect on insight into the frequency of vicarious trauma from the respondents but gain views of those attending the session to reflect on the possible adverse effects on front line practitioners.

In this Lunch and Learn session, Professor Donald Forrester, Director of CASCADE, will discuss the purpose of social work, the implications for research and leadership and for practice - assessment (briefly)and direct work.

This presentation explores the ways in which we conceptualise and understand child neglect in our professional practice. Due to its conceptual complexities, neglect can often be more difficult to evidence and effectively articulate in safeguarding practice compared to other forms of child maltreatment. As a social construct, neglect can change over time, place and culture, with our understandings informed by ideas about what constitutes ‘good enough’ care of children in our communities. This can raise challenges for practitioners in reaching shared understandings of neglect when working across professional, organisational, and cultural boundaries. This session provides an opportunity to pause and reflect upon the ways we conceptualise child neglect in our practice, and consider the ways this may impact our multi-professional practice when supporting children and their families.

Attendees are provided with a free taster chapter from Victoria’s book ‘Working with Children who have Experienced Neglect’.

In this digital online session, Chibuzo Unachukwu talks about the definition and attributes of Affluent Neglect, spotting the signs, the barriers, why is this difficult to spot and what can be done.

This session will primarily cover the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel’s national review into child sexual abuse within the family environment. It will highlight the key learning for systems and practice in order to respond to this type of abuse.

It will also share key updates from the Panel, including its latest Annual Report and recent briefing paper on race, racism and safeguarding children.

The report can be read here.

The session will consist of a 30 minute presentation, with the remaining time allotted for attendees' questions.

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).

in 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