Creating Safe Reflective Spaces for Child Protection Practice.

Organisational cultures of calm and compassion are highlighted as being conducive to supporting effective organisational safeguarding children practice. The importance of safe spaces for practitioners is considered to enabling quality supervision and mentoring of staff and, nurturing the advocacy skills of practitioners in protecting the rights of children. A focus is given to the effect of past trauma of abuse and the impact on responses and decision-making in the protection of children. The chapter includes a focus on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ (Shusterman,1999) and its application and meaning for child protection practice. A fictitious case scenario based on domestic violence and abuse aims to represent important issues related to mentoring and coaching in supervision and child protection practice, any resemblance of the case study to a past or present case is entirely coincidental.