Oldal 180 [180]
OCR
TIINA MERKULJEVA CHILD PROTECTION IN ESTONIA The child protection in Estonia is ensured by the local government and community organizations. The municipalities will drop the primary responsibility for protecting and assisting children. The role of child protection workers is to protect and assist the child in need. Child protection is based on the networking. It means that child protection worker cooperate with other agencies mainly in two ways — first, responding to others’ by incoming information and secondly, by addressing the abused child to other specialists for treatment or evaluation and other assistance.’ The case-based approach requires the ability to organize the work to protect the client (child), which includes the establishment of trust relationships based on direct contact with the child and his family, client counseling emphasizing strengths, meetings and conversation, problem solving, implementation the law and monitoring.’ This requires certain resources available to this worker—the time to collect information and analyze this information, support, and supervision. The increasing number of children and families in need means more cases of assessment and decision making for child protection workers. It is crucial for the child protection worker to have knowledge of new reforms and approaches in the given field and the process of assessment should be informed by this information. To achieve this, the child protection worker must have the knowledge and skills to approach the child and family and to engage them in a trusting relationship. In this case, child protection workers require external support for the assessment decisions in order to strengthen and improve the quality of the assessments—supervision, colleague, services, and legislation‘. Supervision has a major role to play in safeguarding social workers (child protection worker) in a process that can assist them to manage emotions and uncertainty. There are inevitable tensions at the intersection of the personal and professional, where ‘dangerousness’ may be a fear and optimism may be muted.°* Reflective supervision in individual or group format provides an opportunity to consider case material in detail and depth, including the ways in which the 1K. Soo ~ K. Ilves — J. Strémpl, Networking and notification of cases of child abuse, Final Report, University of Tartu, Institute for Sociology and Social Policy, 2009, 27. ? E.Korp -R. Rääk, Child protection in local government, Tallinn, Ministry of Social Affairs and Health Development Institute, 2004, 23-24. 3K. Toros, Assessment of Child Well-being: Child Protection practice in Estonia, Tallinn University dissertations on social sciences, 2011, 127. 4 Ibid., 26. 5 L. Beddoe, Surveillance or Reflection: Professional Supervision in ‘the Risk Society’, British Journal of Social Work, Vol. 40, 2010, 1288. * 178 +
