‘But don’t tell anybody’: The dilemma of confidentiality for the lone social worker in the context of child protective services

Social workers repeatedly find themselves confronted with a dilemma regarding the seemingly conflicting responsibilities of support and control. In the field of child protection, such a dilemma can literally be fatal in situations where the social worker feels solidarity with parents but also sees the child as in some way endangered. This article presents and discusses the methodological tool of self-reflective research in an attempt to understand the origins and contexts of certain conflicting responsibilities between support and control. This research tool is then applied to the author’s own practice in the field of social and legal protection of children