Social workers can be so concerned with their own well-being that, according to one expert, they may neglect people they're meant to protect. Anne Dempsey reports

Ten days ago, in response to the Laming report into the death of Victoria Climbié, the UK's Independent Police Complaints Commission ordered that six police officers face misconduct charges for failing to protect the eight-year-old from being killed by her so-called carers, a great aunt and her boyfriend, in north London in 2000. At the time of her death Victoria was known to two police child-protection teams, four social-services departments, two housing authorities and the NSPCC. Following the commission's call, the Metropolitan Police Federation said the officers were being blamed for "organisational failure".

That concern about overreliance on organisational systems at the expense of fostering relationships with vulnerable, often difficult families is at the heart of Protecting Children In Time, a new book by Harry Ferguson, professor of social work at the University of the West of England, in Bristol, who has worked in the field for many years in Ireland. His title is a play on words, encompassing both chronological time - protecting children (or not) over the centuries - and the urgency of timely intervention.

His main theme is that the overwhelming response when things go wrong has been to seek bureaucratic solutions, by introducing ever more laws, procedures and guidelines. "The more risk and uncertainty exposed, the greater the attempts to close up the gaps through administrative changes. The feeling is that more organisation is the key to solving problems," he says.

While he proposes a complementary route, he first sets out his stall in a positive arena. Public scandals such as the Climbié case and, in Ireland, the Kilkenny incest and Sophia McColgan cases highlight how professionals fail, yet child-protection systems have never been as effective as they are today. "This does not mean that in general the systems are good enough, only that they have never been better," says Ferguson. "There is nothing new about children being at risk. Life today is not inherently more risky for children."

For much of the 20th century child death was a routine experience for child-protection workers, but the notion that this represents failure is historically recent. "From the beginnings of the protection movement, in the late 19th century, through to 1914 a staggering 13,613 children died in the UK and Ireland in child-protection cases investigated by the NSPCC."

During those years the society published its figures, to show how successful it was at reaching children - in being on the right track, so to speak, even if children died.

Secrecy about statistics crept in during the 1930s, when publishing information about child deaths was seen as bad public relations. Then, in the 1970s, with the advent of public inquiries into unlawful child death, "bureaucracy blame" began. "Ironically, at a time when further improvements in practice meant that deaths in child-protection work became a rare event, managing the risk of system failure became the defining approach," says Ferguson.

This, he says, is the legacy we still live with, and it may be sending policy in precisely the wrong direction. "In the light of the Victoria Climbié scandal, new legislation and other major reforms are under way as part of the biggest reorganisation of child-protection services in 30 years. These will not work, because they deal almost exclusively with trying to find the right organisational fix and fail to address the key issue of the kinds of relationships professionals are able to develop with children and families, in particular the pervasive resistance to agency intervention by such families. Resistance, outright hostility and often violence towards social workers and other professionals have been a constant feature of child-protection cases in which children are known to have died."

His book includes an analysis of more than 300 cases reported to three child-protection teams, including interviews with parents, professionals and children. In more than a third social workers defined parents as unco-operative clients.

We hear too from parents who feel judged and invaded and who, in response, may seek to subvert the system. The reality of mutual misunderstanding and antipathy between parent and professional is, he says, insufficiently expressed. Social workers can, for example, be so preoccupied with their own safety that the child's becomes an afterthought, and just getting out of the house unscathed becomes the professional goal.

"Or when not getting to see the child becomes not a source of concern but a relief - in fact, you have written to pre-announce your visit not as a strategy to ensure they are there but, unconsciously, to sabotage the visit by giving them a chance to be out. And when you knock at the door and there's no reply you skip back up the path - and suddenly the world seems a better place again."

Nor is the resistance one-way. Social workers also struggle internally with clients. A key reason why Victoria Climbié's injuries were never properly acknowledged was that she was diagnosed early in the case as having scabies. This led to three separate professionals deciding not to visit her at home, because of fear of infection.

"The underlying process here concerns how, because of marginality, abused and neglected children raise fear and disgust. So not only parents but abused children have been seen as excluded, dangerous, 'other', a contaminating presence. It is here we find the cultural roots of contemporary problems professionals have in getting close to children."

A similar scapegoat complex flourished in Irish orphanages and industrial schools. So when Ferguson talks about the smell of the work he means its reality, its meaning, but also the assault on the senses when entering homes where the odour of poverty - unwashed bodies, clothes, dirt and decay - can make you gag.

This can impel social workers towards a speedy getaway and emotionally distance them from their clients' lives, values and experiences, which they may regard as incomprehensible or downright wrong.

Ferguson believes that child-protection work will not improve until people are more open, accept its limits, develop their professional skills, better their understanding of the volatile and complex nature of its relationships and explore ways to remove obstacles to dealing with client hostility.

One core suggestion is that agencies and policy-makers change their focus and begin to look at child protection from the inside out rather than the outside in. "Not from the direction of the public into the private but from the private outwards, from the vantage point of embodied experience. In other words, what happens when worker meets client, by stepping across the threshold of their home and into their lives, should provide the core concerns for training, understanding practice and policy development."

He calls these the "fateful moments" of encounter, advocating that the glimpses of the totality they contain need to be placed at the centre of child-protection studies.

Put like that, the home sounds like a space of possibility, in which the relationships are paramount, and work can be done in the present moment between all concerned. "Empathy, sensitivity, warmth and the doctrine of unconditional positive regard are still consistently identified as what social work should be about. . . . But this is very difficult in child-protection work. We need to acknowledge more the conflict at the heart of its relationships. Practitioners need training in what has been described as conflict management. . . . [Some things must be\] non-negotiable - we must see and be able to engage with your children, be able to call unannounced and so on," he says.

"What is needed is a critical theory of child protection without guarantees. Paradoxically, acknowledging this vulnerability can be a source of strength."

Protecting Children In Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection And The Consequences Of Modernity by Harry Ferguson is published by Palgrave Macmillan, £16.99 in UK