The Poverty-Aware Paradigm for Child Protection: A Critical Framework for Policy and Practice

This article aims to present a Poverty-Aware Paradigm for Child Protection (PAPCP). The increasing scholarly recognition of the damaging impact of poverty, inequality and the neoliberal politics of ‘risk’ on child protection policy and practice, has highlighted the need for a justice-based and poverty-aware analytical framework for child protection social work. In order to create such a framework, we build upon Krumer-Nevo’s Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP)—that was first presented in a previous issue of the British Journal of Social Work—and adapt its paradigmatic premises to the context of child protection social work. By addressing ontological, epistemological and axiological questions underpinning the construction of risk and the practices uti- lised to deal with it, the article provides a clear, practical and applicable link between critical theories and everyday child protection practice. The PAPCP is presented against the background of the risk-focused paradigm currently dominating the child protec- tion systems in both the authors’ countries—Israel and England.