Child Protection Guidance 2021

National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland 2021 Part 1: The context for child protection 12 Version 1.0 September 2021 mediation skills, and shared understanding about roles and boundaries. Part 13 of the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 describes eligibility for assistance in kinship care for children including those subject to a kinship care order, or at risk of being looked after, and for kinship carers, including those in whose favour a kinship care order subsists, or who may be applying for, or considering application for such an order. 1.32 Private fostering refers to children placed by private arrangement with persons who are not close relatives. ‘Close relative’ in this context means mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, grandparent, of full blood or half blood or by marriage. Where the child’s parents have never married, the term will include the birth father and any person who would have been defined as a relative had the parents been married. Private fostering in Scotland: practice guidance for local authority children’s services Be safe, be sure (Scottish Government (2013)). What is child abuse and child neglect? 1.33 Abuse and neglect are forms of maltreatment. Abuse or neglect may involve inflicting harm or failing to act to prevent harm. Children may be maltreated at home; within a family or peer network; in care placements; institutions or community settings; and in the online and digital environment. Those responsible may be previously unknown or familiar, or in positions of trust. They may be family members. Children may be harmed pre-birth, for instance by domestic abuse of a mother or through parental alcohol and drug use. Physical abuse 1.34 Physical abuse is the causing of physical harm to a child or young person. Physical abuse may involve hitting, shaking, throwing, poisoning, burning or scalding, drowning or suffocating. Physical harm may also be caused when a parent or carer feigns the symptoms of, or deliberately causes, ill health to a child they are looking after. 1.35 There may be some variation in family, community or cultural attitudes to parenting, for example, in relation to reasonable discipline. Cultural sensitivity must not deflect practitioners from a focus on a child’s essential needs for care and protection from harm, or a focus on the need of a family for support to reduce stress and associated risk. Emotional abuse 1.36 Emotional abuse is persistent emotional ill treatment that has severe and persistent adverse effects on a child’s emotional development. ‘Persistent’ means there is a continuous or intermittent pattern which has caused, or is likely to cause, significant harm. Emotional abuse is present to some extent in all types of ill treatment of a child, but it can also occur independently of other forms of abuse. It may involve: • conveying to a child that they are worthless or unloved, inadequate or valued only in so far as they meet the needs of another person • exploitation or corruption of a child, or imposition of demands inappropriate for their age or stage of development • repeated silencing, ridiculing or intimidation • demands that so exceed a child’s capability that they may be harmful • extreme overprotection, such that a child is harmed by prevention of learning, exploration and social development • seeing or hearing the abuse of another (in accordance with the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018)

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