Manufacturing Bad Workers: How Oppressive Practices in Child Protection are Maintained

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dc.contributor.advisorMcKeen, Wendy E.
dc.contributor.authorAzevedo, Joanne Jenny
dc.date.accessioned2024-07-18T21:17:44Z
dc.date.available2024-07-18T21:17:44Z
dc.date.copyright2024-03-28
dc.date.issued2024-07-18
dc.date.updated2024-07-18T21:17:44Z
dc.degree.disciplineSocial Work
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis research seeks to better understand the institutional mechanisms that work to maintain oppressive practices in child protection social work settings. This research examines the ways in which the child protection system continues to function in discriminatory and punitive ways that are not reliably effective at keeping children safe from abuse or neglect. These oppressive functions remain despite what can be presumed to be the best of intentions of legislators, policy makers, administrators, and child protection social workers (CPW), and despite the countless legislative, policy, and practice changes that have been embarked upon to reform child protection in Ontario in the past. Using methods informed by Institutional Ethnography (IE), this research examines how the various attempts at reform to the child protection system in Ontario have changed the ways that frontline child protection workers carry out their work and interact with their service recipients. In addition to an IE approach, this research incorporates autoethnography to include direct experiences and observations as a means to unpack some of the ways that frontline CPWs experience, respond to, and are complicit with oppressive practices. Also included is an examination of a recent reform in Ontario, the implementation of the Child Protection Information Network (CPIN) between 2014 and 2019. CPIN provides an opportunity to examine how child protection work is organized, and some of the ways that CPWs themselves are recruited into the ‘work’ of maintaining the status quo. Participants shared their experiences around the ways that CPIN integrated neoliberal rationalities, solidifying commitments to cost-saving, efficiency, and heavy regulation. Rather than disrupting structures of oppression endemic to the systems of child protection, reform efforts like CPIN serve to maintain and even further entrench disparities. To sustain itself, child welfare draws CPWs into understandings of ostensible benevolence as ‘child saviours’, fostering relational distance that allows for and enables dehumanization, and employs rigorous and fear-motivated accountability circuits that keep workers in line, while punishing those who fall outside them. In other words, in its current form, the child welfare system, to sustain itself, must be invested in manufacturing “bad” workers.
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/42128
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectSocial work
dc.subject.keywordsChild welfare
dc.subject.keywordsChild protection
dc.subject.keywordsInstitutional ethnography
dc.subject.keywordsOppressive practice
dc.subject.keywordsSystemic racism
dc.subject.keywordsSystemic oppression
dc.subject.keywordsWhiteness
dc.subject.keywordsCPIN
dc.subject.keywordsCYFSA
dc.subject.keywordsAutoethnography
dc.subject.keywordsPunitive managerialism
dc.subject.keywordsDehumanizing discourses
dc.subject.keywordsValorizing discourses
dc.subject.keywordsTemporality
dc.subject.keywordsNeoliberal rationalities
dc.titleManufacturing Bad Workers: How Oppressive Practices in Child Protection are Maintained
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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