"They call the spirituality of my ancestors madness": embracing spiritually sensitive practice in child protection while working with children of African heritage and their families in Australia

Australia's population is expanding in diversity, particularly from African, subcontinental Asian, and Pacific Island nations. Many people coming from these lands have a keen awareness of the daily influence and presence of the spiritual realm. When seeking assistance from social work services in the West, service users can be met with resistance and/or ignorance by social work practitioners, who can have the tendency to deploy only a mental health/illness perspective rather than an acknowledgement of the presence and influence of spirituality upon service users' experiences and daily lives. Children of African heritage and their families are represented in the child protection system. Families from such backgrounds may have an understanding of the origins, causes and solutions to their problems as being grounded in spiritual/religious perspectives 1. Social workers in the Australian child protection system, however, can operate from vastly different ontological and epistemological bases, which mould responses and interventions and might further impact children and their families if not approached from a spiritually sensitive practice framework. There is a clear need for social work generally and specifically child protection practice to be more open to and accepting of the ontological and epistemological realities of religious and spiritual experiences of African-Australian children and their families. Drawing on practice examples from a child protection specialist and social work educators in Sydney, Australia, this chapter seeks to highlight the gap in current social work practice and advocate for a spiritually sensitive practice that incorporates ontological and epistemological differences as forms of diversity competence within practice. These considerations are fundamental to a strengths-based and anti-oppressive approach, without which social workers are at risk of imposing their worldviews upon service users, whose spiritual orientations and experiences with which they are not conversant.