The Unheld Child: Social Work, Social Distancing and the Possibilities and Limits to Child Protection during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The recent tragic deaths in England of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and sixteen-month-old Star Hobson during the first phase of COVID-19 have raised questions about why social workers did not protect them. The introduction of social distancing due to the pandemic disrupted the ways social workers used play, talk and touch to understand children's experiences and the research we report on in this article explored how able were social workers to keep children safe and help families from a distance? We followed the work of forty-eight social work staff over the first nine months of the pandemic and found that they were creative in seeing children on video calls and outdoors, and some did get physically close to children. There were, however, significant constraints on their work. High levels of anxiety and fear of infection made it hard for them to think straight and stay focused on children on home visits, to play or even touch toys. Working from home rather than in the office cut them off from vital sources of peer and supervisory support. Better understanding of these limits will be crucial to keeping children safe for the remainder of the pandemic and beyond it. The COVID-19 pandemic changed dramatically the ways social workers engaged with children and families. This article presents findings from our research into the effects of COVID-19 on social work and child protection in England during the first nine months of the pandemic. Our aim is to provide new knowledge to enable realistic expectations of what it was possible for social workers to achieve and particularly the limits to child protection. Such perspective has become more important than ever due to knowledge of children who died tragically from abuse despite social work involvement during the pandemic. Our research findings show how some practitioners got physically close to some children, whilst being distanced from others. We examine the dynamics that shaped closeness and distance and identify seven influences that created limits to child protection and the problem of 'the unheld child'. The article provides new understandings of child protection as embodied, multi-sensorial practices and the ways anxiety and experiences of bodily self-alienation limit practitioners' capacities to think about and get close to children. Whilst social workers creatively improvised to achieve their goals, coronavirus and social distancing imposed limits to child protection that no amount of innovative practice could overcome in all cases.