Family Support: Prevention, Early Intervention and Early Help

Nick Frost, Shaheen Abbott, Tracey Race

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745672601, 9780745672595
• eBook ISBN: 9781509502479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Family Support introduces and explores the state of the art in preventative social work with children and young people. Drawing on contemporary thinking and research, the book aims to make a contribution to current debates about how we can best support families in need. Underpinning the book is an analysis of how family support is changing, having moved from 'prevention' through to contemporary debates about 'family support', 'early intervention' and 'early help'. The authors draw on their own practice experiences to ensure the discussion remains highly relevant to everyday realities. The book consists of three parts: Part I examines the history and context of family support; Part II outlines a number of practice approaches to family support; and Part III suggests how family support work can be further developed. The book provides 'think points' and case studies to support the reader in reflecting on the material presented and how this can be best applied, as well as including a guide to useful resources. Family Support will be a welcome companion for anyone involved in child welfare and safeguarding services, including students at undergraduate and post-graduate level, practitioners, policy makers and academics.

PART I
UNDERSTANDING FAMILY SUPPORT

1
The Historical, Social and Political Context of Family Support

This chapter explores the historical roots and origins of family support in order to understand the contested definitions, theories and practice of family support in the contemporary policy context. Throughout the book, we will make the argument for family support as a fundamental practice within child welfare, and we will explore the implications for policy makers, researchers and practitioners alike of placing family support at the centre of child welfare policy and practice.

Understanding the historical context is crucial if we are to situate current debates within child welfare and if we are to truly understand continued tensions in the wider realm of child welfare policy and practice. Since the 1970s, high-profile child deaths, subsequent media campaigns, public concern and political controversy have together created a seemingly irresistible move towards a potentially punitive child protection system based upon an emphasis on risk assessment and authoritarian intervention. This varies across the globe and is perhaps more apparent in England, whilst being less so in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This trend towards risk assessment-based work has contributed to the marginalization of prevention and family support: thus child protection has become increasingly dominant at the cost of more partnership and family support-based practices. This key tension has dominated the literature, and the argument for a rebalancing of family support and child protection has been widely discussed (for example, see Featherstone, White and Morris 2014; Frost and Parton 2009; Parton 1997).

Whilst debates within child welfare about whether to use ‘family support’, ‘early help’ or ‘early intervention’ may seem technical and perhaps obscure, we see them as actually key to wider social issues of concern to us all: debates about social equality, childhood, opportunity and well-being. As Featherstone and colleagues have commented on the influential work of Wilkinson and Pickett:

A linked insight from their work concerns how inequality within a society quite literally ‘gets under the skin’ of individuals, leaving them feeling unvalued and inferior. They note the work of the sociologist Thomas Scheff, who has argued that shame is a key social emotion. ‘Shame and its opposite, pride, are rooted in the processes through which we internalize how we imagine others see us’ … Greater inequality heightens our anxieties because it increases the importance of social status. We come to see social position as a key feature of a person’s identity in an unequal society.’ (Featherstone, Morris and White 2013: 4)

Thus the concerns around family support link to wider concerns about poverty, inequality, identity and well-being. Structural problems, such as poverty and inequality, generate social problems, such as child neglect and child abuse, and are linked to the nature of state intervention in family life. These are the core concerns of family support workers.

In this book, we argue for comprehensive family support for all families rather than, for example, narrow programmatic, time-limited approaches. Family support needs to operate alongside wider-scale economic and social reforms. Thus we maintain that we should not separate debates about family support from those about poverty and inequality. We live in an era of gross inequalities, both within specific societies and more widely between different nation-states. For example, it has been estimated that 30 per cent of children in the United Kingdom live in poverty, compared with other developed European countries such as Norway, where it is 4 per cent (Browne 2012).

Post-global crash public-spending restrictions and benefit reforms in many late capitalist societies have increased trends towards inequality. A major programme of research funded by the Family and Parenting Institute (Browne 2012) analysed the experiences of ‘Families in an Age of Austerity’. The research indicates that families with children are ‘shouldering a disproportionate burden’ of the austerity measures (Browne 2012: 3). The disparity increased in 2014, seeing families with children with children losing 6 per cent of their income, compared to the 2 per cent lost by pensioner households, and also losing more income than working-age households without children (3 per cent), as well as all households (3 per cent) (Browne 2012: 3). In England, it is particularly concerning that the lowest-income families seem to be losing the most through the reforms, thus undermining the intentions of the Child Poverty Act 2010 and its avowed aims of reducing child poverty. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, there are specific anti-child-poverty programmes which underpin family support policy. For example, the Welsh government is promoting a programme known as ‘Tackling Poverty and Promoting Children’s Rights’. Child poverty in Northern Ireland is analysed in a report known as Child Poverty in Northern Ireland (Child Poverty Alliance 2014). The Scottish approach works towards three outcomes as follows:

• Maximizing household resources – our aim is to reduce income poverty and material deprivation by maximizing financial entitlements and reducing pressure on household budgets among low-income families, as well as by maximizing the potential for parents to increase family incomes through good-quality, sustained employment and by promoting greater financial inclusion and capability. (Pockets)
• Improving children’s well-being and life chances – our aim is to break intergenerational cycles of poverty, inequality and deprivation. This requires a focus on tackling the underlying social and economic determinants of poverty and improving the circumstances in which children grow up – recognizing the particular importance of improving children’s outcomes in the early years. (Prospects)
• Children from low-income households live in well-designed, sustainable places – our aim is to address area-based factors which currently exacerbate the effects of individual poverty for many families by continuing to improve the physical, social and economic environments in local areas, particularly in those areas of multiple deprivation in which child poverty is more prevalent. (Places)

Whilst this book is aimed specifically at that those professionals involved in child welfare practice, the issues raised here are fundamental to wider debates around problems such as poverty which are central to the well-being and quality of life for all citizens.

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Point for reflection: What are the links between poverty, inequality and family support practice?

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Child welfare in history: 1870–1914

It is essential to place contemporary debates about family support in a wider historical context. The origins of child welfare can been found in the nineteenth century, characterized by the rescuing and reclamation of children predominantly through the heritage of the Poor Law, and were led by emerging philanthropic organizations. Victorian constructions of child welfare practice enabled the practitioner to understand the concepts of risk, danger and child cruelty within failing families which were seen as ‘feckless’ and ‘immoral’ (see Gordon 1988). The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) acquired predominant responsibility for both preventing and addressing child cruelty. It adopted a largely reforming approach towards parents in contrast to the early ‘rescue’ approach, favoured by Dr Thomas Barnardo, for example (Frost and Stein 1989). These early practices highlight the fact that child welfare was at the time predominantly in the sphere of philanthropy; the national, state-based interest in children and families emerged in the late nineteenth century, to be consolidated by the Children Act 1908 (Hendrick 2003).

The shift in attitude towards intervention in childhood, exemplified by the foundation of organizations such as the NSPCC, developed after the British industrial revolution, when cities grew rapidly and social processes developed a professional and commercial bourgeoisie. It is estimated that at least five million people were removed from their homes to make way for industrial change (Stedman Jones 1976). The British industrial revolution led to rapidly growing cities and often grim conditions for the new industrial working class. A crucial impact of this was the attempt to control the poor, the ‘dangerous’ and the ‘feckless’ by rendering them liable to philanthropic and state intervention (Hendrick 2003).

The influential social historian Harry Hendrick contends that this industrialization and urbanization process led to a situation where ‘children were given a new social and political identity as belonging to the nation’ (2003: 19) at the end of the nineteenth and the start of the next century. Reforms, such as the Children Act 1908, embodied a wider range of services provision for families, including public access to health and education. These reforms were largely motivated by concerns about the health and well-being of children, who were seen as essential to the future of Britain as an industrial, imperial and military power (Hendrick 2003).

In the late nineteenth century, the exercise of unfettered parental (or more specifically paternal) responsibility had significantly decreased and marked the beginning of tensions between parental and state authority. A shift in attitude had emerged which meant that the welfare of children began to take precedence over parental claims to privacy and authority over their families.

A brief history of the NSPCC

The NSPCC was founded in the United Kingdom in 1884. Lord Shaftesbury was appointed as president and Reverend Benjamin Waugh and Edward Rudolf as joint honorary secretaries. This came about as a result of a letter from Reverend George Staite published in the Liverpool Mercury, highlighting the significant impact of abuse, cruelty and inhumanity on children, underpinned by social deprivation and inequality. The letter called for the formation of a society to prevent cruelty to children and is in retrospect a landmark in the history of child welfare (Frost and Stein 1989). Victorian social attitudes remained clear on the boundaries between public and private lives; however, Staite wrote a letter to Lord Shaftesbury, a leading philanthropist, requesting legislative backing for intervention in abusive families. Although Shaftesbury agreed that the evils of child abuse were ‘enormous and ‘indisputable’, he also stated ‘they are of so private, internal and domestic a character as to be beyond the reach of legislation’ (quoted in Behlmer 1982: 52). Shaftesbury’s response highlights the predominant attitude at the time: that the family home was inviolable and not to be disturbed or intruded upon. This dividing line between the family and the state remains the key tension in child welfare, a divide that family support continually negotiates and brokers.

The social, economic and political climate of the time is crucial to understanding the continued struggle of the NSPCC to bring child abuse into the public domain. The profoundly unequal condition of the United...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Understanding Family Support
• PART II Delivering Family Support
• PART III Overarching Issues in Developing a Sustainable Approach to Family Support
• Conclusion: Family Support Past, Present and Future
• Resources
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement