Abstract

The challenges of contemporary child welfare practice are well documented in many countries worldwide. The current study enhances this work by reporting the lived experiences of child welfare workers in Chile, who negotiate their practice in a strained political and organisational context. A qualitative methodology was used to understand the complexities of the survival strategies of these workers. Data were collected via multiple individual interviews and group workshop sessions with six workers of different Chilean National Service for Minors' collaborating organisations. Through a constructivist grounded theory analysis, we identify three major complexities that shape and construct the strategies of survival that the Chilean child welfare workers deploy in a neo-liberalised labour context: (1) Surviving a violent labour context (precariousness and dehumanisation); (2) surviving labour ambiguities (fractures and resistance) and (3) surviving oneself (pain-filled and violence executors' bodies). We discuss these findings in the context of the scholarly literature and offer implications for policy and macro practice to alter the work conditions of this professional field. Child protection workers in Chile work in a strained political and organisational context. This qualitative study, based on individual and group interviews with workers, identified three key elements of surviving this work: a violent labour context, labour ambiguities and pain-filled worker bodies. Findings reflect the realities of this work within a neo-liberal context and offer reflections on the need to change work conditions to fulfill the role of protecting children. Child welfare is known to be a challenging area of practice across the globe. Amongst industrialised democracies, several themes are commonly described, including ambiguity and precarity; stress, burnout and vicarious trauma and coping strategies and resilience development to face occupational challenges. Ambiguity and precarity refer to the difficult position for workers when they are forced to balance incongruent roles (e.g. investigator and helper) with limited resources. described that child welfare workers must negotiate their daily work practices within a labour context of explicit and implicit ways of doing their job-e.g. formal regulations, local procedures, determined workload and institutional expectations-that are usually misaligned with each other. In a context of lack of resources, this positions workers amid a myriad of tensions that must be individually resolved as they perform their duties.