Changing Families

Crescy Cannan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317867043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a case study of the shifting boundary between family and state in Britain from the mid 1970s to 1990. The book describes a variety of family centres and shows how they have responded to the crises in child welfare and social work. The book also considers the issues of gender in policy.

CHAPTER 1

THE FAMILY AND THE STATE

Introduction

This book is a case study of the shifting boundary between family and state in Britain. It will look at the growth of family centres from the mid 1970s onwards in order to describe the processes by which private family responsibilities and public state responsibilities have been realigned and underlined. While this shifting boundary became especially visible during the Conservative (New Right) restructuring of state welfare in the 1980s, I shall show that there is a long British tradition of maintaining a high boundary between the family and the state: state reluctance to share the care of children or other dependent people with their families is not something novel but, rather, is consistent with British attitudes to the family as a domain quite separate from the public. What we see is a case of family and ‘community’ responsibilities being stated more forcibly at a time when local government was being deprived of its powers and resources by a strong central government, which simultaneously promoted the expansion of the voluntary (not-for-profit) and the private (commercial) sectors in social care. I shall be looking, then, not just at New Right social policies but also at Labour Party and Social Democratic policies, at the role and attitudes of the social-work profession, at the voluntary childcare organizations, and at local authority social services departments in the period 1972 to 1990.

If it can be shown that social provision is the outcome of a political struggle (rather than simply the imposition of dominant ideas), what are the implications for the services themselves: whose needs do they serve, what characterizes their users? I shall consider the deeper implications of family centres, asking whether – given that they grow from the demise of daycare and residential care for children – they support women in their care of their children, and whether they can promote opportunities or a more just allocation of domestic tasks. I shall also be concerned for children: are family centres an effective way of promoting healthy childhood, and how do they compare with childcare provision in other European countries? To anticipate a little: I shall show that, while we can find examples of good practice, as a system family centres are highly unstable: they are diverse, variable in coverage, aims, and above all in quality. I shall return to issues of accountability, equity, equal opportunities, and quality in the final chapter.

Chapter 2 will survey the range of types of family centres, Chapters 3 and 4 will examine their roots in discourses on child welfare and the ‘crisis’ in the family. Chapter 5 will consider the role of social work in family centres, and Chapter 6 will attempt to prescribe a theoretical and practical framework for good practice. In this chapter I shall set out the social context of family centres, and raise the gender issues which will pervade the book. I shall argue that family centres have obscured these, despite the fact that most of their users are women (89 per cent in Warren’s [1990] national survey), and that existing research into and accounts of family centres produced within the social-work profession tell us only part of the story.

British social policy is based on a tradition of family privacy: rather than the state sharing in the tasks of rearing future citizens and supporting families by reducing the strain on carers (women), there is a dominant view that ‘normal’ families would not want or need state intervention which should, rather, be reserved for the feckless, deviant or inadequate (Finch, 1989; Riley, 1983). Part of the regulatory quality of family centres lies in their connection of maternal behaviour, family life and child abuse. Alternative discourses on child welfare problems have been marginalized – especially the demand for universal, public daycare for children. There is a long history of using child abuse as an issue to define ‘normal’ families and their domestic roles and responsiblities (Frost and Stein, 1989; Gordon, 1988; Parton, 1985); in this perspective only abusive or ‘problem’ families ‘need’ services; the majority cope, and therefore do not need them.

Family centres have diverse philosophical roots: while they regulate in ways we shall explore, they also have the potential to provide welfare services which mesh with users’ stated needs and promote opportunities. It is my view that in the 1990s professions and the welfare state, far from being intrusive of or damaging to working-class life (as was argued by left libertarians such as Geach and Szwed [1983]), actually neglect need, especially the needs of those groups who are unattractive or socially undervalued: the alcoholics, the elderly mentally ill, the chronically mentally ill, lone mothers, abused women, depressed women – all these receive too little material and social assistance from the welfare state (Brown and Harris, 1978; Dingwall et al., 1983; Edwards, 1989; Illsey, 1981; Scull, 1984; Sedgwick, 1982). Women are forced back into traditional caring roles – through lack of alternatives and through lack of assistance in their tasks. In the field of care of disabled and elderly people this is starkly evident: an ideology of caring as ‘natural’ for women has legitimated the placing of community care in the family. Reviewing the now extensive research on the impact for carers, Dalley (1988) says:

The experiences recounted in study after study revealtherealityofcommunitycarepoliciesforbothcarerandcared for alike. There is pervasive lack of choice … the professional services – hostels, group homes, home nursing, home helps, day care, respite care – which are envisaged by service providers as comprising community care, are everywhere proving insufficient, even where bolstered by voluntary organization support. The networks of neighbours, friends and extended kin may help on a sporadic and irregular basis … but rarely match the expectations defined as care by the community. Most often, care-giving devolves on to those closest to the dependent person – and those deemed to be closest are generally wives, mothers and daughters – or the dependent person is left to cope alone. (Dalley, 1988: 7)

Women and children need services and support from the state, and it seems to me that it is mistaken to dismiss state welfare as damaging to working-class families. Violence to children or women should be publicly responded to with protection and support for victims and control and treatment of perpetrators. In caring for children, just as for other dependent people, women should receive support and validation in the form of a range of daycare and respite services, and they should be able to choose the form of service that suits their needs. Lack of social provision is counter to children’s needs for sociability and stimulation, and counter to women’s rights to work or train or engage in public life. This book, then, is concerned with the quality of service provided to families as a whole and to women and children in their own right, and it will ask how much the discourses on the ‘crisis’ in the family and on welfare dependence have legitimated a decline in services for families.

Family centres: from welfare dependence to parental responsibility

Family centres began to appear in the mid 1970s, with rapid growth from the early 1980s, totalling around 500 centres nationally by the late 1980s (Warren, 1990). They have been greeted by social workers and childcare organizations as a positive development, something innovative and progressive. Their manifest aims have been to promote the care of children in their own families, to prevent children coming into public Care, and to support families in need. Before the 1989 Children Act children could be taken into Care on a court order (compulsory Care), or by parents’ consent (voluntary Care). But so-called voluntary Care could harden into a long-term form of Care with parents losing their rights, and the system was heavily stigmatized (see Chapter 3 for a full account of the critiques of the Care system). By the mid 1970s there was concern at these processes, and the prevention of receptions into Care became a goal of social services departments. Family centres were established to work with families on the brink of the Care system, and they will continue the same role under the Children Act. The term ‘in Care’ under the Children Act refers to those under court orders; others will be ‘in need’ or using support services such as family centres to prevent the need for compulsory court procedures, and to promote the care of children by their own families.

Family centres are targeted on areas of social deprivation and seen as ‘preventive’ resources: preventing entry into Care, child abuse, isolation and loneliness in mothers. They are run by statutory social services departments, voluntary organizations, or sometimes by consortia or partnerships of self-help, voluntary and statutory organizations. Some have a clear social work role, others a more open, neighbourhood approach. Despite the optimism associated with them, however, there is some concern in the family centre world as to their aims (are they too broad, how do we know what is effective?) (Gibbons, 1990; The Short Report, 1984). It is this underlying concern with latent as well as manifest aims which I shall be concerned to unravel.

That the clientele of family centres are both worked on and receive a service is characteristic of service organizations (Blau and Scott, 1963); associated with this is strong professional power in negotiating the nature of clients’ problems and the manner of their solution. However, the ‘character work’ (Strong, 1979), the behavioural focus, of some family centres reveals something else: these centres are not just providing a service to their users, they are also what Blau and Scott refer to as ‘commonweal organizations’ – set up for the public at large, so that by containing and treating deviant families, they benefit society. All family centres convey norms of socialization and parenthood, but they convey them directly and individually in their social work and collectively through the participation of conforming local people where there is more of a community work orientation.

In this time of welfare reconstruction, family centres serve another commonweal function: that of disseminating norms of welfare consumption and an ideal of family independence. In many centres the goal of preventing welfare dependence, of checking consumption of day and residential childcare services (and of rehabilitating from such dependence), has been as important an aim as that of child protection and prevention of entry into Care (Cannan, 1990). Oaklands Family Centre provides an example of this aim. The social services managers and the project organizer had to produce a plan acceptable to a Conservative county council committed to limiting expenditure and encouraging informal care and self-responsibility. The centre’s aims (as set out in its literature) were:

to help reduce the need for families with financial, domestic and child related problems becoming dependent clients of statutory welfare agencies.

Another centre aimed:

wherever possible to allow parents and children to becomeless dependent on the Centre through reduction of attendance.

One director of social services introduced his department’s strategy in 1984 as:

a major shift in emphasis towards an effective preventive strategy …. It is my firm belief that the recommendations contained in this report will ensure that [the] department remains in the forefront of national developments.

His department’s new policy was to replace residential childcare provision with locally based services, which aimed to support children at home rather than removing them: ‘risks may need to be taken in order to avoid the well-recognised consequences of care’.

During the 1970s and 1980s both residential care and day nurseries were portrayed in local authority strategy documents (such as those quoted from above) as causing problems because of the separation of parent (mother) and child, as being emotionally unhealthy environments, and as encouraging irresponsibility in parents. An assumption was made that future ‘dependence’ on social services would be prevented by diverting clients from them, using therapeutic and community development methods to achieve this. Reducing dependence and promoting responsibility are, therefore, aims in most social services family centres, and indeed of the voluntary centres, for they are part of the ‘community’, and usually part-funded by local authorities’ social services departments to increase informal community resources. Not only do most of these centres aim to reduce dependence on the statutory agencies, but they talk of changing parents’ behaviour and providing ‘the minimum services necessary to enable a family to cope’, and measuring ‘success against those families able to move on or at least, reduce their hours of attendance’.

This aim must be seen in the context of financial pressures on local authorities: during the 1970s and 1980s childcare projects were typically funded by the central government Urban Programme or by local authority grants. A series of government Initiatives provided short-term central funding through consortia of voluntary agencies’ projects within Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) criteria. The most significant initiatives for family centres were the Under Fives Initiative of £6m over three years from 1983, which helped 45 local projects (Holman, 1986), and Opportunities for Volunteers, with £5.5m over three years from 1982. The minute scale of this funding is clear when it is compared to a typical social services department annual budget of £15m at that time (which was still insufficient to meet demand). The majority of family centre documents, whether from Conservative- or traditional Labour-controlled areas, colluded with this situation of underfunding by portraying dependence on services as an ‘obvious’ problem. ‘Prevention’ meant restricting use of child welfare services, for the conventional wisdom was that ‘Care’ was a bad (and expensive) thing, and that use of social-work services could start a Care career.

The social workers and other family centre workers in my study tended to view being in Care negatively, and used labelling theory to refer to the danger of developing deviant careers, especially in the senses of mental illnesses, criminality, or poor future parenting. Packman (1981) also noted this in her research on social work practice with children. This attitude partly arose from the concern expressed from the 1970s onwards that too many children were in Care. Under the Labour government this concern was officially voiced in the Short Report of 1984 on Children in Care. These children were overwhelmingly from poor families, and it was argued that social services departments should strive to support such families rather than splitting them up (Holman, 1976). While noting the shortage of daycare and that easier access to daycare would help families at risk of losing their children into Care, the Short Report did not recommend an increase in daycare; rather, it advocated more childminding for under-2s as a welcome, ‘less institutional’ approach (paras 44–5).

At the same time, radical social and community workers were taking up the issues of parents’ rights, arguing that professionals abused their power in work with ‘problem families’ and demanding instead solidarity with and participation by the poor (Liffman, 1978; Thomas, 1983). This movement was contemporary with the legal rights movement (among prisoners, claimants, and psychiatric patients) which, in this context, produced the Family Rights Group in 1975, which continues to campaign for and argue for adequate legal representation of families involved in Care proceedings (Tunnard, 1987).

While these movements stressed the rights of the poor and of natural parents, some of the impetus for family centres came from those who voiced different criticisms of social workers, arguing for more decisive practice and planning (e.g. Goldstein, et al., 1973). The fostering and adoption lobby argued that once in Care children tended to drift aimlessly downwards, and that such children could be released for permanent fostering or adoption (Rowe and Lambert, 1973). From all sides there was criticism of childcare services, a marginalization of the campaigns such as the National Child Care Campaign, which called for expanded and improved daycare services for children. ‘Prevention’ meant (as it had meant since the 1948 Children Act) keeping children out of institutional services rather than improving the range and quality of those services.

The 1970s, then, brought critiques of state welfare from Right and Left: social workers were described as patronizing and as mystifying social or personal problems (the Left view), or mollycoddling those who would otherwise learn independence (the Right view). Responsibility and independence became a theme – and not just in the social sphere: in the health field, initial optimism on the establishment of the National Health Service was checked by rising costs, especially of hospital care and treatment, and by rising demand. DHSS documents such as Prevention and Health – Everybody’s business (1976) stressed that individuals must modify their own behaviour to improve their health. Graham (1979), commenting on these documents, shows how the path to good health was seen to lie in health education and the assumption of personal responsibility for healthy lifestyles. Further, in the case of children’s health, maternal responsibility in meeting children’s needs – emotional, intellectual and physical – was the keystone. Thus, in medicine, prevention became identified with health education and the promotion of healthy lifestyles within the physical and emotional life of the family (Davies, 1984).

Strong views on parental responsibility were expressed by the Magistrates’ Association (Tutt, 1981), which urged the Conservative government to revert to more custodial regimes for delinquents. The 1980 White Paper on Young Offenders stated:

the Government believes it is important that the courts should … be able more effectively to bring home to parents their responsibilities in relation to juveniles who offend…. (Home Office, 1980: para. 53)

This stress on parental responsibility for crimes of children under 16 and the aim of making parents accountable for their children’s actions were incorporated in the 1982 Criminal Justice Act, with a stronger version proposed in the 1990 White Paper on Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public. In the event, the issue has proved contentious. While Conservative Party conferences have applauded the aim of making parents responsible, concerted opposition from magistrates and organizations such as the Children’s Legal Centre and NACRO (the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders) has prevented this becoming a reality because of the impossibility (and questionable effectiveness) of implementing it amongst families who may be too poor or incapable of enforcing discipline over their children (Hoghughi, 1991; The Magistrate, July 1991).

The 1989 Children Act, like the White Papers on cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 The family and the state
• 2 Family centres observed
• 3 Roots of family centres: the politics of childhood
• 4 Roots of family centres: motherhood and the state
• 5 Social work and family centres
• 6 Towards good practice in family centres
• 7 New family policies
• Bibliography
• Index