Walking This Path Together is an edited collection devoted to improving the lives of children and families that come to the attention of child welfare authorities by demonstrating and advocating for socially just child welfare practices. In this new, updated edition, authors provide special consideration to the historical and political context of child welfare in Canada and theoretical ideas and concrete practices that support practitioners, educators and students who are looking for anti-racist, anti-oppressive and anti-colonial perspectives on child welfare practice.

Failure-to-protect policies and practices are intended to better ensure the safety and protection of children. But as this book demonstrates, these policies actually increase danger for children -- and for their mothers. While failure to protect is not always encoded in policy documents, practices that engage mothers and hold them responsible for violence in the home, while excusing or ignoring the male offender, are common. Moreover, these actions most often play out on the shoulders of marginalized and already oppressed women and, in a cruel twist, place blame on mothers because they are "unable" to protect their children from factors beyond their control, such as poverty, racism, intimate partner violence and inadequate housing. In this book, writers from Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia explain how the concept of failure to protect emerged and how it differentially impacts child welfare clients by virtue of their gender, race and class positions. Chapters dedicated to child sexual abuse and intimate partner abuse, for example, illustrate just how ineffective failure-to-protect policies are at protecting both women and children. Beyond a critique of child protection systems, the book proposes innovative and effective alternatives to policies and practices informed by failure to protect. This edited collection compels us to think critically about knowledge that is taken for granted and opens up possibilities for practices that are not only grounded in social justice but fulfill the mandate of child welfare to effectively protect children.

This book analyses the introduction, development and reification of the concepts of 'children witnessing' and mothers 'failing to protect' as powerful and currently dominant child welfare ideas in the United Kingdom and Canada. Discourse analysis methods from a number of sources were drawn on to reveal and interpret how and why the discourse of 'failure to protect' has emerged, how it shapes and informs child protection practice and policy, and the effects on both mothers and social workers. Strega demonstrates that the concepts of 'children witnessing' and mothers 'failing to protect' are constructed, enacted and deployed in ways that maintain and perhaps even increase the nature and extent of violence against women and children. She contends that the rhetoric and actions engendered by these discourses are in themselves injurious to women, both individually in cases where mothers lose or are threatened with the loss of their children, and collectively in contributing to a continuing failure to hold responsible or even notice men who perpetrate violence against mothers.

This resource offers students and experienced practitioners alike the opportunity to explore a range of visions, strategies and concrete skills for anti-racist and anti-oppresive child welfare practice.