Repression of suicide risk in child protection: a study of the inability to speak about suicide risk for professionals receiving children placed in care

This article is a contribution to qualitative research on the risk of suicide and its invisibility in the collective structures of child welfare services. Based on a survey of social workers, we try to show how they perceive and qualify this risk. We highlight the centrality and recurrence of the unutterable component of suicidal behaviour during investigatory interviews, which led us to consider it as an analytical concept. This unutterable component, far from being irreducible to sociological analysis, informs us on how social workers are affected (regarding their professionalism and their reflexivity) and on the contexts in which this unutterable component appears (organization of daily life, management of collective life). These contexts contribute to minimizing, or invisibilizing the suicidal risk and also lead social workers to hide their own work practices. This unutterable component appears ultimately as a product of analysis of suicidogenic contexts in child protection services.