Risk work within adult safeguarding practice

In this book, I have drawn on theories of risk work to consider how social workers understand and manage risk. The issue of risk is central to adult safeguarding with current law and policy focusing on ‘safeguarding adults at risk of abuse or neglect’. However, little attention has been given to the way the concept of risk is understood and deployed by social workers when doing adult safeguarding work. Previous research has used the framework of risk work to examine adult safeguarding (Robb and McCarthy, 2023), though this research focuses specifically on safeguarding people with learning disabilities. The remit of my research was wider and examined safeguarding decisions across all adult groups. Drawing on theories of risk work, this book has focused on the interactions between risk knowledge, interventions and social relations (Brown and Gale, 2018a, 2018b). It has also considered how social workers seek to balance these key features and the tensions which occur between them.

This concluding chapter aims to do two things. In the first section, I examine what the research tells us theoretically about risk. Here, I show how my theories compare to those of previous social work academics and what this research tells us that is new. In the second section, I turn to the issue of policy and practice to explore what changes should be made.

Risk and social work revisited

Many social work authors have drawn on Beck's assertion that risk has replaced need in contemporary society to argue that risk has replaced need in social work practice (Alfandari et al, 2023). The concept of risk is largely seen in negative terms in the critical social work literature. Risk is seen to shift the focus away from present need to a concern about what might happen in the future (Webb, 2006; Green, 2007). This is seen as altering the focus of social work practice, which becomes concerned with future risks over current needs. These policy responses are also seen as promoting neoliberal notions of choice by considering which service users are encouraged to assess and manage risks in their own lives, and this is associated with the withdrawal of state services (Kemshall, 2016). Furthermore, it is argued that social worker interventions become framed by statistical information, which neglects the voice of individual service users (Webb, 2009).