Over the last 15 years, social work with children and families has become increasingly focused on child protection. This is often very difficult for parents. Many do not trust child protection social workers and fear that they will try to take their children away. The purpose of different processes is often unclear to those not working in the system and the use of technical and legal language makes it hard to understand. For these reasons, parents often fail to engage with meetings or processes, which in turn, leads to social workers escalating their involvement.
Failure to engage parents also has consequences for the child. However, parent advocacy has been found to help parents to build positive relationships with social workers and to have more of a say in how to keep their children safe. In some areas, parents have been offered support from people who were trained to provide these services (often referred to as ‘professional advocates’) and in others, they have been supported by people who had lived experience themselves before being trained (often referred to as ‘peer advocates’).
As part of an ongoing study, we spoke to parents with lived experience of child protection services, who had not all had advocates. Their perspectives were different from those of research participants because they were talking about what they would ideally like to happen, rather than reflecting on how good or bad their experience of existing advocacy services was.
Parents in the group strongly supported the idea of providing advocacy for parents going through the child protection process. They accepted the idea of advocacy support being provided by both ‘professional’ and ‘peer’ advocates. However, they discussed some distinct advantages of ‘peer’ advocates. They saw peer advocates as being more likely to have an emphatic understanding of parents, based on their own lived experiences. They also noted that the role of ‘peer advocate’ could provide parents with an opportunity to draw on their past experiences with child protection to help other parents negotiate this process. This was seen as particularly important, as parents felt that their, often traumatic, previous personal encounters with child protection services could be utilised in a positive way to facilitate effective support for other parents. They cautioned against advocates working too closely with social workers, which might undermine parents’ trust in them. They emphasised the importance of robust support for advocates, including training and supervision. The parents involved offered unique important insights into their perspectives on the role of advocacy and provided concrete practical solutions to the problems that were discussed.
Dr Harriet Lloyd
Research Associate, CASCADE
More information about this project is available here:
Lloyd, H., Harris, C., Cook, L., Williams, J., Roderick, L., Price, Z. and Diaz, C. 2025. ‘They get it, they’ve been through it’: how lived experience can shape understandings of peer parent advocacy. Social Sciences 14(6), article number: 361. (10.3390/socsci14060361)
