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• Learning the lessons from serious child abuse cases can prevent harm in future. • Lack of 'professional curiosity' and 'challenge' are inadequate explanations. • More productive understandings for practice would be communication and courage. • Awareness of the ambiguous policy context is also essential. • Well supported staff and properly resourced services are vital. Learning lessons from cases where children have been killed or seriously harmed from abuse or neglect is important for child protection policy and practice around the world. In England there is a long-established system of locally based, multi-agency reviews. Three recurrent themes over the years have been the poor quality of assessments, shortcomings in inter-agency working and information sharing, and not knowing the children and understanding their experiences. The reviews often identify a lack of 'professional curiosity' and insufficient 'challenge' on the part of child protection practitioners as the cause of these problems. This paper analyses these concepts, drawing on four recent studies of child safeguarding reviews conducted by the authors and their research team. It uses qualitative data from the reports and the views of local professionals in online focus groups. The reviews tend to use the perceived lack of curiosity and challenge as the explanation for poor practice without interrogating why, when and in what circumstances it becomes more difficult for professionals to remain curious and appropriately challenging. Professional curiosity and challenge are complex, multifaceted concepts, and applying them in practice is difficult and skilled work. The paper argues for a more nuanced and grounded understanding of the concepts and their application in practice. It sets them in wider frames of communication and courage, and the ambiguous policy context of a preference for cooperative engagement with families but high expectations about protecting children. It offers recommendations for future research into the review process, authorship style, practice in local agencies and national government policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the results of a commissioned systematic map of UK child protection empirical research published between 2010 and 2014. It analyses current patterns in child protection research in relation to three variables – disciplinary background of authors, types of maltreatment examined, and focus of the research – and considers the relationship between these. It finds first authors' disciplines to be reliable indicators of both the focus and topic of the research, with the dominant fields of psychology, medicine, and social work addressing respectively the long term outcomes of sexual abuse, the short term outcomes of physical abuse, and the care system's response to child maltreatment. The proportion of research dedicated to specific types of maltreatment appears to depend on factors other than their real-world prevalence. Instead, definitional issues and ease of access to research participants appearing to be more influential in determining the topic of the research. UK child protection research appears to show narrow multidisciplinary interaction and little focus on preventative or ameliorative interventions. The development of a coordinated national strategy adopting an interdisciplinary approach in the design and commissioning of child protection research could help maximise research efforts by reducing duplication and potentially facilitating the emergence of more innovative directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]