Introduction

In the previous chapter, I explained how social workers understood adult safeguarding principles and how they applied these to their work. This highlighted tensions between the ways social workers drew on law and policy as a source of risk knowledge and the limitations imposed on their interventions by austerity. Reductions in health and social care spending were seen to lead to safeguarding services being the “last stop”, and this was seen as having an impact on the volume and complexity of safeguarding work. These pressures impacted on social relations by limiting the contact service users were able to have with professionals. The safeguarding principles embedded within the Care Act 2014 were interpreted in a variety of ways, with many using them to justify reducing services in line with resource constraints. In this chapter, I focus on the act of working with service users, family carers and care providers (such as care workers) when doing risk work within adult safeguarding. Specifically, I focus on the use of risk assessment tools, practical problems with person-centred safeguarding work and how social workers engage with service users and carers when assessing safeguarding risks and making safeguarding decisions.

Recording risks and negotiating responsibility: the use of risk assessment tools

As we saw in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, risk work involves translating risks into different contexts (Gale et al, 2016). Risk assessments form a core part of this process and can be understood as an intervention within the theoretical framework of risk work (Brown and Gale, 2018b). When using risk assessments, workers need to understand the types of knowledge they can draw on and how these might apply to the service users they are working with. In cases where workers can draw on research data to calculate the risk of an event occurring, the translation of risk involves the application of abstract data (risk knowledge) to individual cases. Where research data is not available, professionals may draw on other knowledge, such as personal experience or intuition (Zinn, 2016). As we saw in Chapter 2, several writers contend that the logic of statistics has driven risk assessment practice within social work (Webb, 2006, 2009; Pollack, 2010; Kemshall, 2016; Doody et al, 2017). Arguments have also been made that risk assessment practices encourage ‘responsibilisation’ (O’Malley, 2009).