Families who attract the attention of child protection services most often have ongoing lived experiences of poverty, gender-based domestic and family violence, problematic substance use and, sometimes, formally diagnosed mental health conditions. Without broader contextual knowledge and understanding, particularly regarding ongoing poverty, decision-making by child protection workers often leads to the removal of children, while the family’s material poverty and experiences of violence remain unaddressed. Case studies are a common tool to succinctly capture complex contexts. In this article, we make explicit, through case examples and analysis, how poverty is almost always the backdrop to the presence of worrying risk factors before and during child protection intervention. Further, we expose the existential poverty that parents live with after they lose their children into care and which invariably exacerbates material poverty. In the final section, we consider the multi-faceted organisational poverty that blights the work environment of child protection workers, and we suggest strategies for improved practice with families living in poverty.

中文翻译：

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贫困是问题——不是父母：那么告诉我，儿童保护工作者，你能提供什么帮助？

吸引儿童保护服务机构关注的家庭通常都经历过贫困、基于性别的家庭暴力、有问题的物质使用，有时甚至还被正式诊断为精神健康状况。如果没有更广泛的背景知识和理解，特别是关于持续贫困的情况，儿童保护工作者的决策往往会导致儿童被带走，而家庭的物质贫困和暴力经历仍未得到解决。案例研究是简洁地捕捉复杂背景的常用工具。在本文中，我们通过案例和分析明确说明贫困几乎总是在儿童保护干预之前和期间存在令人担忧的风险因素的背景。进一步，我们揭露了父母在孩子失去照料后所面临的生存贫困，这总是加剧物质贫困。在最后一部分，我们考虑了影响儿童保护工作者工作环境的多方面组织贫困，并提出了改善贫困家庭实践的策略。