A Preliminary Account of Child Protection Practice With Romani and Traveller Children in England

Child protection services in England work hard to prevent abuse and to stop it quickly when it happens. The harmful risks to children and young people that child protection professionals in England seek to address include sexual exploitation, forced marriage, domestic abuse, physical abuse, neglect, emotional abuse, female genital mutilation, online abuse, bullying and trafficking. To assist child protection professionals in their duty to protect children from these risks, there has been a steady accumulation of robust scientific findings on the long-term effects of maltreatment, making the establishment of a coherent evidence base that can be used to guide, steer and inform the decisions that are made.
In making decisions about the welfare of children, child protection professionals are supported in several different ways. International and national laws and social policies provide specific duties in relation to children ‘in need’ and children ‘suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm’. The Children’s Commissioner develops strategies to promote and protect the rights of children, and professional regulatory frameworks guide and monitor standards of behaviour conduct and ethics. Management structures, a central focus on the voice of the child and multidisciplinary working help to determine and substantiate verifiable assessments, and an independent Local Safeguarding Children’s Board acts to scrutinise the credibility and reliability of decisions being made. Taken together, the purpose and function of each individual mechanism is to work together to ensure that the welfare of the child is safeguarded as a paramount concern.
Underscoring professional regulation and the relevant legal and social policy frameworks is the evidence base and training that is essential to guide and inform practice. Whilst there has been an increase in research converging around issues of child protection generally, there has been an unequal focus on safeguarding Romani and Traveller children. According to Allen the uneven attention being given to the role of child protection with Romani and Traveller children means that practice can become determined by individual intuition, sentiment and tacit knowledge rather than empirically or theoretically informed judgment. A recent serious case review in England, for instance, has shown that a lack of methodological diversity within the field of child protection research with Romani and Traveller children also means that some child protection professionals, including those in the position to manage and scrutinise the quality of casework decisions, can overlook unhelpful value judgements, including the words ‘it’s in their culture’, because they too are making decisions that are determined by a tacit knowledge base. Although the child protection system should ensure that the welfare of the Romani and Traveller child is paramount, emerging concerns suggest that the decisions being made, and the actions being taken, do not always achieve this central duty.
To examine the concerns that have been listed more fully, the authors of this report have been commissioned by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) to carry out a preliminary study into the scale and nature of child protection practice with Romani and Traveller children in England. Specifically, the study aimed to:

  1. Highlight the principal reasons for child protection involvement with Romani and Traveller children;
  2. Map the placement type and legal status of Romani and Traveller children involved in child protection systems;
  3. Examine the reasons for the placement of Romani and Traveller children in state care;
  4. Explore how child protection professionals describe their work with Roma children; and,
  5. Shed some light on the experiences of families who have experienced child protection involvement.


The findings presented in this report reflect data that has been gathered in four separate ways. First, data was gathered through a series of Freedom of Information Requests to the Department of Education. Second, data was gathered from 137 questionnaires completed by child protection professionals working in England. Third, data was gathered from focus group interviews with 155 child protection professionals working in England. Finally, data was also gathered from two families who have experienced child protection involvement in family life.
Taken together, the data presented in this report indicates that child protection professionals working with Romani and Traveller children in England are generally ill-equipped and under pressure. In most cases, they are not supported to develop the professional competence needed to effectively safeguard Romani and Traveller children. Although child protection professionals do not deliberately set out to work in a discriminatory way, a lack of resources, training, community-based resources and opportunity to critically reflect before practice, can lead to fragility in professional capability and poor decision-making. In extreme instances, some of the practice reported in this report is oppressive.