As a profession, the work of social workers can be heavily informed by the law, particularly in child welfare and protection: Law Assignment, UCD, Ireland

As a profession, the work of social workers can be heavily informed by the law, particularly in child welfare and protection. Their job requires them to intrude into the strongly protected sphere of family life with the aim of protecting the rights of vulnerable children. Every decision they make inherently involves an assessment of the rights at stake, the evidence available, and the likelihood of meeting statutory thresholds. In many jurisdictions, social workers spend an increasing proportion of their time in court, making applications for a variety of orders.

The constant necessity for social workers to engage with the law is reflected in a slew of textbooks designed to support social workers in their practice, focusing on law, theory, and skills and aiming to inform social workers about what the law is. By comparison, there is a much more modest body of literature considering the experiences of social workers in instituting childcare proceedings and giving evidence in court. Because court proceedings are a fundamental and increasingly time‐consuming aspect of social work practice, it is essential to improve our understanding of how social workers interact with and perceive the court system.

In many European jurisdictions, a large number of children enter through voluntary, “negotiated” administrative measures rather than through compulsory decision‐making fora such as courts or court‐like bodies (see Burns, Pöso, & Skivenes, 2017). However, when parents disagree with the social work assessment or are unable to make the requisite changes to their parenting, or oppose efforts by social workers to protect children from abuse or neglect, some form of court or court‐like proceedings are required to break the deadlock and determine what is in the child’s best interests.

In Ireland, two third of the admissions of children to state care are through the voluntary care pathway. The remaining one-third of involuntary care order decisions are made in the District Court, which is a non‐specialist, single-judge court, in which child care proceedings are run in a largely adversarial manner.