Child Protection and Welfare Services for Disabled Children: Insights Through an Ecological Systems Frame

Social injustices around maltreatment risk and professional safeguarding responses for children with disabilities feature in international research. In general, children with disabilities are substantially more likely to experience violence and maltreatment above their majority population peers. Adding to this disadvantage are service discrepancies, shortcomings, under-resourcing, and bureaucratic stalemates in safeguarding of children with disabilities. In safeguarding casework, the individual lived experience of the child with disability and structural societal context are often separated. Pressurised practice realities of child protection work compel this, because attention to immediate risk at an individual level often prevails over making societal change. Yet, the complexity of intersecting inequalities around disability and child protection includes the individual lived reality and the power-saturated social organisation of societies at large. As such, the focus in this article is on critical application of an ecological systems frame. This is used to conceptually map key factors spanning all levels at the intersection of disability and child protection. Discussion is then presented to consider the significance of findings. In concluding, implications for future policy and practice are considered.