When denial isn’t just denial: Rethinking engagement in Child Protection

By Richard Devine, Social Worker and Author of Messy Social Work: Learning from Frontline Practice with Children and Families

Introduction

One of the phrases we often use in child protection is “disguised compliance.” It sits alongside terms like “non-engagement,” “minimisation,” and “denial.”

“Disguised compliance” can be a helpful way of naming a familiar pattern: when what we see on the surface doesn’t match the level of underlying risk.

But it can also carry a moral weight, suggesting deliberate concealment, rather than encouraging curiosity about what might make honesty or change feel unsafe or impossible.

In practice, we record the missed appointments, the unanswered doors, the partial accounts, and the changing stories, and we feel that familiar sense of concern.

Sometimes, if we’re honest, we also feel frustrated:

Why does this keep happening?

Why won’t they just tell the truth?

Why won’t they accept help?

For a long time, I thought of denial as a simple, either/or process: a parent was either recognising the reality or choosing to hide it.

But the longer I’ve worked in frontline child protection, the more I’ve realised that this kind of flat, binary view misses a lot.

The recent national safeguarding practice review into the tragic death of baby Victoria Marten, Protecting All Vulnerable Babies Better, explicitly challenges the sector to rethink this static language.

The review suggests that for parents who have experienced the trauma and grief of successive child removals, avoiding services or concealing a pregnancy is not always a simple refusal to cooperate.

Rather, from the parents’ perspective, it may be understood as a “subjective rational choice” shaped by trauma, grief, shame, fear, and a deep mistrust of authority.

When we read reviews of this scale, the mandate for trauma-informed practice feels clear enough in theory. But what does that actually mean on a Tuesday afternoon when you are standing on a doorstep?

To make sense of this in frontline practice, I have found it helpful to move away from blanket terms like “disguised compliance” and “non-engagement” and instead think more carefully about what is actually happening psychologically and relationally.

In my own practice, I’ve increasingly come to understand these deadlocks through three overlapping processes:

1. Strategic Denial
2. Protective Denial, and, crucially,  
3. Defensive Practice on the part of professionals and systems.

These are ways of thinking rather than fixed categories, and in practice they often overlap, shift, and exist at the same time. They don’t explain everything, but they help us slow down and think more clearly when behaviour feels uniform or hard to understand.

When we look at things this way, we start to see that the same “uncooperative” behaviour can come from very different underlying processes

1. Strategic Denial: “I can’t say”

Sometimes parents are acutely aware of the reality. They know the local authority’s concerns are true, but speaking them aloud feels dangerous.

They might ask themselves:

1. If I admit this, what happens next?
2. Will they remove my child?
3. Will this be used against me in court?

In these moments, denial isn’t just a lack of insight. It’s a way of protecting yourself from something that feels overwhelming or catastrophic.

A parent may experience the social worker not as help, but as a potential threat. Even if they understand the concerns, fear can make being fully honest feel too risky.

So they choose their words carefully – editing what they say, downplaying concerns, or cooperating just enough to ease pressure without fully exposing themselves.

This is about self-preservation. When the stakes are your children, staying quiet can feel safer than being completely open.

It isn’t constant, but it can often become strongest when the risk of consequences feels most immediate.

2. Protective Denial: “I can’t face it”

At other times, the issue is not primarily strategic. The truth itself may simply feel psychologically unbearable.

In these situations, denial operates less as conscious concealment and more as a form of emotional survival.

The mind protects itself from realities that feel overwhelming, shaming, or impossible to fully process.

This is more likely to be seen where there is cumulative trauma, repeated loss, or experiences of services that have previously felt punitive, destabilising, or unsafe.

But it is important to recognise that “protective denial” is not a single process. It can arise in different, overlapping ways depending on the person’s history, capacity for reflection, and current level of emotional threat.

a. When patterns exist outside awareness

Sometimes what looks like denial is not really denial at all.

It is a lack of reflective awareness.

People may have developed ways of surviving, relating, or managing distress in childhood that were once adaptive, but which continue into adulthood without conscious recognition.

Many of us will recognise this; ways of adapting to early relational environments that only later become visible through reflection, theory or therapy.

These patterns can shape relationships, parenting, and coping strategies in ways that feel entirely normal or “just who I am.”

In these situations, the difficulty is not that someone is refusing to see the problem; it is that the pattern itself is not yet available to be seen clearly.

It has never been reflected back in a way that makes it knowable and thinkable.

In that sense, what professionals may interpret as denial can sometimes be something closer to unformulated experience – behaviour that is organised, but not yet consciously understood.

At the risk of oversimplifying this complex pyscho-social process, it’s like speaking with an accent you’ve never noticed.

You learned it early, it helped you belong and get by, and it feels completely natural – just “how you talk.” Other people might hear it clearly, but to you it’s invisible because no one has ever reflected it back in a way that made you aware of it.

So it isn’t that you’re denying the accent – it’s that, until that moment of reflection, you didn’t know there was anything to notice.

b. When the truth threatens the self (shame-based processes)

At other times, the person does have some awareness of the harm or difficulty, but full recognition carries an overwhelming emotional cost.

To fully acknowledge the reality may involve confronting:

• guilt about harm to children
• shame about parenting, relationships, or addiction
• fear of being seen as “bad” or “failing”
• collapse of a preferred or surviving sense of self

In these situations, denial functions as a stabilising force.

It softens reality just enough to keep emotional functioning intact.

If the truth is fully admitted internally, it may also destabilise how the person understands themselves.

So the mind protects against that collapse by keeping parts of reality at a distance – minimising, reframing, or selectively attending to certain aspects of experience while excluding others.

This isn’t just avoiding responsibility. It’s often an attempt to protect a fragile sense of self when the truth feels too hard to hold

c. When change feels unsafe (fear and survival-based processes)

In other cases, the central issue is not shame but fear.

Even when someone can see that something is wrong, the alternatives may feel equally threatening, or even more so, than the problem itself.

For example:

• leaving an abusive relationship may mean retaliation, homelessness, or isolation
• stopping substance use may mean confronting unresolved trauma or emotional pain without support

In these situations, denial can function as a form of psychological and practical survival.

The person may not only doubt whether change is possible, but also whether they can survive what change would require.

This is particularly important because, in some contexts, that fear is not irrational. It is grounded in real risks, past experiences, and a lack of supportive alternatives.

So denial here is less about refusing reality and more about trying to manage exposure to a reality that feels unmanageable.

How these processes overlap

In practice, these different forms of protective denial rarely appear in isolation.

They often overlap and interact.

A person may:

• not fully recognise their own patterns of behaviour
• feel deep shame about aspects they do understand
• fear the consequences of change
• and therefore, rely on minimisation or selective disclosure as a way of staying psychologically and practically afloat

Over time, these processes can also contribute to more strategic forms of concealment.

If the emotional or practical cost of full acknowledgement feels too high, then presenting a partial or edited version of reality can become not just understandable, but necessary.

What might look like “non-engagement” or “resistance” from the outside is often a complex effort to manage overwhelm, consequences, and survival needs all at once.

Seen this way, protective denial is not a single thing to be “worked through.”

It is a range of psychological responses to experiences that feel so threatening that they cannot be fully integrated at that moment.

The task in child protection practice is therefore not simply to increase insight or force recognition, but to understand what makes full recognition feel unsafe, overwhelming, or impossible.

3. Defensive Practice: “I can’t look too closely”

Alongside thinking about what may be happening for parents, we also need to pay attention what happens to us as professionals.

This work brings us into regular contact with fear, hostility, unpredictability, and distress. At times, situations feel unsafe. At other times, what we are seeing feels so overwhelming or chaotic that it is hard to fully take in.

When that emotional demand outweighs the support around us, our practice can start to shift.

This can show up in very ordinary ways.

• We might avoid asking the question that could escalate things.
• We accept an answer that doesn’t quite hold, because pushing further feels like too much.
• We visit less, or avoid seeing the child alone.
• We find ourselves leaning towards explanations that make the situation feel more manageable.

This is not always a conscious choice, but a shift in what feels possible to hold in mind under pressure.

In her 2005 paper Conceptual Analysis of Critical Moments in Victoria Climbié’s Life, Margaret Rustin, a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist, argued that

“many of the actions (or moments of inaction) described in the report [of Victoria Climbie] as obvious evidence of incompetence relate to the desire of professionals to keep a distance from the intense feelings stirred up by exposure to human cruelty and madness.”

This resonates not because professionals don’t care, but because being close to distress can make it harder to stay curious, consistent, and open to uncertainty.

Hostile parents can narrow our thinking through fear.

More organised or compliant presentations can have the opposite effect, creating a sense that things are “probably fine,” and reducing our level of scrutiny.

Seen this way, defensive practice isn’t separate from difficulties with engagement. It is part of the same emotional system, playing out on both sides of the relationship.

This narrowing of focus doesn’t just show up as avoidance. It can also lead to over-compensation. When we feel anxious, stuck, or under pressure, we may become more confrontational in response to a parent’s denial.

Professor Donald Forrester’s research shows, this kind of confrontational approach is sadly quite common.

And that’s despite the fact that it is often counter-productive, increasing parental resistance rather than reducing it.

His research illustrates that what we describe as “resistance” is sometimes shaped by what we bring into the interaction, but we rarely name or record it in that way (Donald Forrester and I spoke about these themes here).

How Do We Practice Differently?

Recognising these different processes changes how we approach engagement. We cannot use one blunt response for fundamentally different human experiences.

Bypassing strategic denial through transparency

If a parent is in strategic denial because they are afraid of the consequences, our task is to reduce that sense of threat without losing focus on the child’s safety.

This means being as clear and open as we can about what we know, what we’re worried about, and what might happen next.

Instead of falling into a back-and-forth of trying to catch things out, we bring the difficult reality into the conversation directly:

“I get the sense you might be feeling pretty scared about being open about how much alcohol is a problem right now, especially if you’re worried it could lead to your child being taken away. That’s a really common fear for parents.

At the end of the day, it’s your choice what you share with me. But from what I’ve seen, when parents hold things back, it makes it harder to get the kind of support that can actually help things change. Often the situation just gets worse, and that can mean we have to step in more seriously later on”.

The aim isn’t to remove responsibility, but to make honesty feel a bit more possible in a situation that feels very risky.

Working gently with protective denial

Protective denial can become stronger when it is met with confrontation, especially when shame or fear is already high.

If shame is driving it, pushing parents with evidence can increase the need to defend themselves.

Instead, we may need to try to lower the emotional intensity enough that reflection becomes at least possible in some moments.

This can involve separating the person from the behaviour, acknowledging the difficulty of change, and creating enough relational safety for difficult truths to emerge gradually.

Where denial is linked to fear of the solution, we also need to recognise that simply demanding immediate transformation is unlikely to work.

Telling someone to “just leave” an abusive partner or “just stop using” substances ignores the profound losses, fears, and emotional consequences attached to those changes.

The work often becomes about empathising and recognising their fears as rational and logical, and about identifying small, psychologically manageable steps toward safety rather than expecting immediate or total change.

But we also need to recognise that admission isn’t the only way to make a child safe.

A key influence on my thinking here is the work of Andrew Turnell and Susie Essex in Working with Denied Child Abuse. Their writing helped shift my view of denial – from something to overcome, to something we have to work with in practice.

They make an important point: it’s possible to create safety for children even if parents don’t agree with the concerns.

In other words, agreement isn’t the same as safety.

This shifts the task. The question becomes less,

“How do we get parents to admit what’s happening?”

and more,

“What needs to be in place, right now, to keep this child safe—regardless of what is or isn’t admitted?”

Note: For information and training on the Working with Denied Child Abuse Resolutions Approach, see here. I wish every social worker could access this.

Reclaiming clarity in ourselves

To reduce defensive practice, we need to stop thinking of child protection workers as purely rational and unaffected by fear, anxiety, disgust, intimidation, or helplessness.

We need supervision where practitioners can say openly:

• “I am frightened of this parent.”
• “I feel overwhelmed in that house.”
• “I think I may be avoiding something difficult here.”

Naming these feelings can help reduce their impact on practice.

In some cases, the most helpful step isn’t another assessment tool, but slowing things down- bringing another professional on a visit, using reflective supervision, seeking a second opinion, or refocusing on the child’s lived experience rather than what feels more comfortable for the adults involved, including ourselves.

Conclusion

Holding the boundaries of child protection while staying trauma-informed and psychologically curious about why both families and professionals act as they do is difficult, uncomfortable, and intellectually demanding work.

What we casually label as denial in families is often not the absence of care, but care under unbearable pressure.

And what we call defensive practice in ourselves is often not the absence of commitment, but care that no longer has enough safe relational or organisational space to think clearly.

None of this removes the need for clear-eyed risk assessment or decisive child protection action where children are unsafe. Rather, it suggests that if we can effectively reduce some of the fear, shame, and defensiveness surrounding professional involvement, we are able to build cooperative and meaningful relationships with parents and critically understand risk more accurately.

In other words, we significantly improve our ability to understand the child’s lived experience.

This approach remains fundamentally child-centred because:

• It improves our understanding of the child’s reality.
  When fear and defensiveness reduce, parents are more able to think, reflect, and speak openly. This gives us a clearer, more accurate picture of what is actually happening in the child’s life, rather than relying on partial or distorted accounts.
• It leads to better, more effective support.
  With a fuller understanding, we are more likely to offer the right help at the right time. This increases the likelihood of meaningful change in the family, which ultimately improves outcomes for the child. It also prevents practice from becoming stuck in unproductive disputes about “the truth.”
• It strengthens the quality and ethics of decision-making.
  When difficult decisions are required, we can be more confident that they are based on genuine attempts to understand and work alongside the family, and this ethical practice matters.

Therefore, while the focus may appear to be on understanding parents’ fears and insecurities, this is not at the expense of focusing on the child…

…it is in the service of maximising the chance of change that genuinely improves the child’s life.

By Richard Devine (20.05.2026)

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