Towards critical child protection: for a relationship-based and humane practice with children and families

Abstract

In the UK social work with abused children and their families has long been subject to changing conceptions, policies and practices. Post-war concerns about child cruelty, ‘battered child syndrome’ and non-accidental injury have been superseded by the current concern with child protection. Such changes are linked to the dominance of neo-liberalism and associated managerialism, resulting in a narrower, truncated role for social work as practitioners concentrate on speedily completing bureaucracy. Now the overall priority is to ration resources and assess/manage risk together with changing the behaviour and lifestyles of parents/carers under the threat of losing their child(ren) to adoption. In contrast, this article calls for a critical child protection, a relationship-based practice which acknowledges social justice issues and works towards a more just and equal society. Despite challenges arising from the neo-liberal world, such critical social work involves a humane practice of working alongside children and families with parents/carers supported and encouraged regarding the issues of concern.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.