Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Trouble ahead? Contending discourses in child protection
- three Building better people: policy aspirations and family life
- four Family experiences of care and protection services: the good, the bad and the hopeful
- five A social model for protecting children: changing our thinking?
- six A social model: experiences in practice
- seven Domestic abuse: a case study
- eight Crafting different stories: changing minds and hearts
- nine Concluding thoughts
- References
- Index
three - Building better people: policy aspirations and family life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Trouble ahead? Contending discourses in child protection
- three Building better people: policy aspirations and family life
- four Family experiences of care and protection services: the good, the bad and the hopeful
- five A social model for protecting children: changing our thinking?
- six A social model: experiences in practice
- seven Domestic abuse: a case study
- eight Crafting different stories: changing minds and hearts
- nine Concluding thoughts
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Sympathy requires an important intellectual and emotional bond between people far apart in space and time. Our biological age has reopened questions about the nature of this bond. (Fuller, 2006: 119)
[A] human mind needs the rest of its body, suitable surroundings and a full memory of past activities if it is to think and act. And it needs them every bit as badly as it needs its brain. (Midgley, 2014: 53)
In the previous chapter, we described the forces that coalesced to support the current dominant modus operandi in child protection and welfare. We argued that models of risk and predictability have converged with the international rise of bureaucratic managerialism and centralised state control of local provision through the regulation and inspection of marketised services. These factors have created the conditions for a moral settlement to take a firm hold. This is characterised by a residual, but strongly legitimised, role for the state in preventing damage to children, which carries high levels of opprobrium for those parents seen as failing to optimise their child's developmental potential. The idea that childhood experiences are important and can be formative clearly has a common-sense truth to it and obviously traumatic experiences in childhood will have lasting impacts. However, a vocabulary has emerged in which notions of toxic parenting and the quest for optimum developmental flourishing create new mandates for the state to act. We argue that these are necessary to explain the sharp rises in national rates of child removal, and particularly permanent removal of very small children documented over the last decade. They also contribute to service fragmentation by privileging intervention in the early years in the form of ‘evidence-based’ parenting programmes.
Rewriting social deprivation in bodies and brains: the great leap backwards
The learned debate about the nature of inequality in class and ethnically stratified societies is a spurious controversy. All major positions, ranging from biological determinism associated with conservative ideologies to environmentalism linked with liberal politics, are actually rationalizations for the status quo of intergroup relations. One key underlying idea shared among seemingly opposed experts is that the position of the oppressed stems from their own weaknesses. (Valentine et al, 1975: 117)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Protecting ChildrenA Social Model, pp. 45 - 66Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018