The Power Threat Meaning Framework in Safeguarding: Can Understanding a Parent's History Help Keep a Child Safe?

When concern is raised about a child

At 31 March 2025, 49,420 children in England were on child protection plans. Neglect was the main category recorded when the plan began for 24,850 of them, and emotional abuse for 18,300 (Department for Education, 2025). Statutory guidance describes neglect as a persistent failure to meet a child's basic needs (Department for Education, 2023, as quoted in local safeguarding procedures).

When concerns are raised about a child, children's social care, the local authority department responsible for children, assesses the child's circumstances, including the care the child receives. The assessment looks at what parents do, because the legal test for a care or supervision order (a court order placing a child in the local authority's care, or under its supervision) turns on whether the child is suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm from the care given (Children Act 1989, section 31(2)).

The duty is to the child. Local authorities must safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need (broadly, children who need local authority services to reach a reasonable standard of health or development) and, so far as that is consistent with the duty, promote the child's upbringing by their family (Children Act 1989, section 17(1)). Child protection practice in England has also been shaped by the inquiry led by Lord Laming into the death of Victoria Climbié, an eight-year-old girl who died in London in 2000 after abuse by her great-aunt and the great-aunt's partner. The inquiry reported in 2003 (Laming, 2003). A Green Paper on children (a government consultation document) followed, which became the Children Act 2004.

Keeping a child with their family where that is safe calls for an understanding of why care has fallen short, and so of the parents' circumstances and histories. The question is whether the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), published by the British Psychological Society, the UK professional body for psychologists, could help the social worker, the assessment, and the family and child.

What assessment already explores

Exploring family history and networks is already part of assessment practice. A genogram is a family tree that records relationships and significant events across generations. Research in Practice, an organisation that supports children's services in the UK, publishes a practice tool on using genograms to understand the full family network and in direct work with children and families (Research in Practice, 2021). English local safeguarding guidance says genograms should be completed with families at the start of work, ideally in the first visits, and describes the genogram as both an assessment tool and an intervention (Local safeguarding children board guidance, England, n.d.).

Statutory guidance, the official guidance that local authorities in England must follow unless they have good reason not to, promotes family group conferences, meetings in which a family and its wider network take part in making decisions about supporting a child (Department for Education, 2023). Local safeguarding procedures that follow the guidance state that the child and family's history should be understood, and that child protection conferences weigh family history and past and present family functioning.

A systematic review (a review that searches for and assesses studies by set rules) of shared decision-making meetings, including family group conferences, found the evidence on care entry, reunification, family empowerment and satisfaction mixed and inconclusive. It found no evidence that the meetings increased the number of children in care or compromised child safety (Nurmatov et al., 2020, as reported by What Works for Children's Social Care).

Reviews of cases that went wrong give a more uneven picture. Serious case reviews are the inquiries held when a child dies or is seriously harmed and abuse or neglect is known or suspected. An analysis of reviews from 2003 to 2005 was reported to find that in some cases little consideration was given to the parents' past histories, with the focus on present circumstances (Brandon et al., 2008).

The tools for exploring history therefore exist. How much weight the history receives in an assessment may vary.

What the Power Threat Meaning Framework asks

The PTMF was developed by a group led by the clinical psychologists Lucy Johnstone and Mary Boyle, working with people with lived experience of mental distress (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018). The framework proposes that emotional distress and troubled or troubling behaviour are better understood as responses to the way power has operated in a person's life than as symptoms of illness. Its core questions are: What has happened to you? How did it affect you? What sense did you make of it? What did you have to do to survive? Further questions ask about a person's strengths and about how the story fits together.

The PTMF was written for mental health and distress, not for child protection. Research in Practice has offered a webinar on using it in social work with children and adults (Research in Practice, 2022).

Several of its questions overlap with what a genogram conversation or a chronology (a dated list of significant events in a family's life) can bring out. What the PTMF may add is a structure for linking what has happened to a parent with how they respond and what sense they make of it.

A worked example: neglect and depression

Four terms are used in this essay. They are YFL's working distinctions, not definitions taken from guidance or law. They are illustrated here with an invented example, modelled on neglect, the most common main category on child protection plans.

A parent has depression. Most days the parent does not get up to make meals or to watch a young child.

Behaviour. What the parent does: meals not made, and the child left unsupervised for long periods.

Distress. What the parent feels and carries: depression, and perhaps exhaustion or the effects of what happened earlier in life.

Thinking. How the parent makes sense of it: perhaps a belief that nobody will help, or that the situation cannot change.

Conduct. The behaviour as judged against a standard, here the care a child needs. The missed meals and the lack of supervision are what is judged against that standard. The depression and the thinking are separate from it, though they bear on how it is understood and on what support is needed.

Asked of this parent, the PTMF questions would explore what has happened to them, how that affected them, what sense they made of it, and what they have had to do to cope. A genogram or chronology might bring out some of the same history. The child's need for food and supervision does not change with the explanation. What the explanation might change is the plan: the support offered, the pace at which change is expected, and what the worker watches for. A child protection plan sets out what has to change for the child to be safe, so it remains open whether understanding why the care fell short alters what the parent has to do for the child to be safe.

How the PTMF has been used in research

Enlander (2022) used the PTMF as a lens to synthesise existing research on birth parents in England whose children had been removed by the state, to understand how early adversity in relationships interacts with social disadvantage to bring families to the attention of child protection services. That is an application of the framework to published accounts, not a test of its use in practice.

A 2024 scoping review (a review that maps the research that exists) in the British Journal of Psychology identified 17 empirical studies that used the PTMF. It found four kinds of use: collecting data, analysing data, studying people's experiences of the framework, and psychological practice. The review reported that the evidence suggests value across a range of settings and populations, that the varied approaches make it hard to synthesise, and that more coherent research is needed.

Cucciniello and Melia (2024) interviewed six social workers working within the Family Safeguarding Model, a strengths-based framework used in some UK child protection services. The model is not the PTMF. The social workers described being able to build a secure base for relationships with families and to consider risk in the context of parents' early trauma, and they described these experiences as diluted by service demand.

None of these studies tested the PTMF in child protection assessment against outcomes for children.

Morgan (2023) offered a philosophical critique of the PTMF. The critique argues that its account of meaning is reductive and that reducing power to threat leads to a linear view of cause. The framework's authors have replied that it is not unevidenced, and that it questions narrow definitions of evidence (Johnstone et al., 2019).

What parents reported

Matthew Gibson, a researcher at the University of Birmingham whose doctoral work concerned self-conscious emotions in child protection practice, used participant observation in an English child protection service to study how parents came to experience shame and humiliation. The study describes processes that support practitioners to shame parents, and notes that social workers can be doing a good job at the same time as shaming a parent (Gibson, 2019).

A 2025 study of 24 parents in England who had experienced parenting support used interpretative phenomenological and narrative analysis, methods for studying how people make sense of their own experience. It identified moralised judgement as a determinant between concealing potential child maltreatment and seeking help. The authors report that fear of moral judgement deterred parents from open dialogue, while feeling accepted and valued enabled greater acceptance of support needs (Maynard & Blake-Holmes, 2025). The parents had received parenting support, not child protection investigation.

In Dumbrill's (2006) interviews with 18 Canadian parents, some responded to power used over them by "playing the game", feigning cooperation. Forrester and colleagues found low empathy and a confrontational style in social workers' conversations with parents, with empathy linked to less resistance and more disclosure (Forrester et al., 2008a, 2008b). Dumbrill's parents were in Ontario, Canada, whose child protection system differs from the English one, so transfer to England is a further question.

What the shame and guilt literature adds

June Tangney and colleagues reviewed research on the self-conscious moral emotions. The review distinguishes shame and guilt and weighs their relative advantages and disadvantages, reports that clinicians, researchers and lay people often use the two terms as if synonymous, and covers the link between childhood abuse and later proneness to shame (Tangney et al., 2007). YFL's essay Want vs Need, Shame vs Guilt sets out the distinction in more detail.

Hypotheses, not findings

If a judgement about conduct is heard as a judgement about identity, it may produce shame, and shame may reduce the openness that assessment and support depend on. The observations above are consistent with this: parents reported shame and fear of judgement, and fear of judgement is described as a barrier to engagement. They do not establish that the shame came from the judgement, that it was the cause of withdrawal, or that a different way of framing the judgement would change the outcome.

Four further hypotheses follow if the PTMF is applied to assessment. Each rests on reasoning and on indirect evidence, and none has been tested.

For engagement and the plan. A child protection plan depends on parents working with the social worker. If shame is a barrier to that collaboration, a framework that asks what has happened to a parent, in place of what is wrong with them, may make shame less likely. Gibson (2019) described processes that support practitioners to shame parents, and Maynard and Blake-Holmes (2025) reported that fear of moral judgement deterred parents from open dialogue. A rapid realist review (a review that builds a theory of how an approach works) of shared decision-making meetings such as family group conferences named building trust and reducing shame among three mechanisms that may make the meetings more likely to reduce entry to care (Stabler et al., 2024).

For the social worker. A framework that asks what has happened to a parent may give a way of raising history that does not read as a verdict. Forrester and colleagues linked empathy in social workers' conversations with less resistance and more disclosure from parents (Forrester et al., 2008a, 2008b).

For the assessment. If histories receive little consideration in some cases (Brandon et al., 2008), a structured account of how a parent's history relates to their present care could inform what support a safe plan needs.

For the family and child. Maynard and Blake-Holmes (2025) reported that feeling accepted and valued enabled parents to accept support needs. For the child, the measure is whether the child is safer, whether at home or elsewhere.

The counterweight: understanding and over-optimism

In 1983 the researchers Robert Dingwall, John Eekelaar and Topsy Murray published a study of how health and social services decided which child abuse and neglect cases to treat as serious. They described front-line workers filtering out the large number of cases they could not deal with as the "rule of optimism" (Dingwall et al., 1983). The term has since appeared in serious case reviews to describe under-responsiveness. Dingwall (2013) has argued that it is often turned into a psychological label used to blame workers, when the original analysis concerned how organisations shape decisions.

For the PTMF, the question is which way understanding pulls. It could help a worker see why a pattern has formed and what support a safe plan needs. It could also make it harder to hold the line when a parent's explanation is compelling. Understanding why care fell short is different from expecting it to change, and the legal threshold turns on harm to the child.

Where this leaves the question

Assessment practice already explores family history and networks, and reviews suggest the weight given to history varies. The PTMF has been used to study parents' experiences and applied in research and practice settings, but has not been tested in child protection assessment against outcomes for children. Three questions stay open: whether it adds anything to genograms, chronologies and family group conferences; whether it would help or hinder a worker's judgement about risk; and how a parent's experience of being assessed is weighed against a child's need for protection. YFL offers the observations and the questions for readers to weigh, not as instruction.

YFL's essay Alliance Evidence in Mandated Work: What Transfers to Child Protection sets out the Dumbrill and Forrester findings in more detail, and What Has Happened to You? The Power Threat Meaning Framework and the Helping Relationship takes up the question of what a helper's opening orientation might do. Does the Helping Relationship Heal? What the Evidence Shows and Cures Ahead of the Evidence: When Interventions Judged Beneficial Were Tested set out why a plausible mechanism still needs a test.

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References

Brandon, M., Belderson, P., Warren, C., Howe, D., Gardner, R., Dodsworth, J., & Black, J. (2008). Analysing child deaths and serious injury through abuse and neglect: What can we learn? A biennial analysis of serious case reviews 2003-2005 (DCSF Research Report DCSF-RR023). Department for Children, Schools and Families.

Cucciniello, C., & Melia, Y. (2024). A fight to work with families, rather than against them: Exploring social workers' experiences of working within the Family Safeguarding Model; an IPA analysis. Journal of Child Public Welfare.

Department for Education. (2023). Working together to safeguard children (statutory guidance). Department for Education.

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Dingwall, R. (2013, September 18). The rule of optimism: Thirty years on. Social Science Space.

Dumbrill, G. C. (2006). Parental experience of child protection intervention: A qualitative study. Child Abuse & Neglect, 30(1), 27-37.

Enlander (2022). Using the Power Threat Meaning Framework to explore birth parents' experiences of compulsory child removal. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology.

Forrester, D., Kershaw, S., Moss, H., & Hughes, L. (2008a). Communication skills in child protection: How do social workers talk to parents? Child & Family Social Work, 13(1), 41-51.

Forrester, D., McCambridge, J., Waissbein, C., & Rollnick, S. (2008b). How do child and family social workers talk to parents about child welfare concerns? Child Abuse Review, 17(1), 23-35.

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Johnstone, L., & Boyle, M., with Cromby, J., Dillon, J., Harper, D., Kinderman, P., Longden, E., Pilgrim, D., & Read, J. (2018). The Power Threat Meaning Framework: Towards the identification of patterns in emotional distress, unusual experiences and troubled or troubling behaviour, as an alternative to functional psychiatric diagnosis. British Psychological Society.

Johnstone, L., Boyle, M., Cromby, J., Dillon, J., Harper, D., Kinderman, P., Longden, E., Pilgrim, D., & Read, J. (2019). Reflections on responses to the Power Threat Meaning Framework one year on. Clinical Psychology Forum, 313, 47-54.

Laming, H. (2003). The Victoria Climbié Inquiry: Report of an inquiry by Lord Laming (Cm 5730). Department of Health and Home Office.

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Nurmatov, U., Foster, C., Mann, M., & Scourfield, J. (2020). Impact of shared decision-making family meetings on children's out-of-home care, family empowerment and satisfaction: A systematic review. What Works for Children's Social Care.

The Power Threat Meaning Framework 5 years on: A scoping review of the emergent empirical literature. (2024). British Journal of Psychology.

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Research in Practice. (2022). An introduction to the Power Threat Meaning Framework [Webinar]. Research in Practice.

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Children Act 1989 (c. 41), sections 17(1) and 31(2).