Troublemakers

The Construction of ‘Troubled Families’ as a Social Problem

Crossley, Stephen, Stephen Crossley

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781447334729
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447334750
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

The launch of the Troubled Families Programme in the wake of the 2011 riots conflated poor and disadvantaged families with anti-social and criminal families. The programme aimed to 'turn around' the lives of the country's most 'troubled families', at a time of austerity and wide-ranging welfare reforms which hit the poorest families hardest.

This detailed, authoritative and critical account reveals the inconsistencies and contradictions within the programme, and issues of deceit and malpractice in its operation. It shows how this core government policy has stigmatised the families it claimed to support.

Paving the way for a government to fulfil its responsibility to families, rather than condemning them, this book will empower local authority workers, policy-makers and researchers, and anyone interested in social justice, to challenge damaging, aggressive neoliberal statecraft.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• one: Introduction: ‘Looking for trouble’
• two: The ‘long and undistinguished pedigree’
• three: The opening of a policy window
• four: The evolution of the Troubled Families Programme
• five: ‘The responsibility deficit’
• six: ‘This thing called family intervention …’
• seven: Street-level perspectives
• eight: Research: ‘help or hindrance’?
• nine: ‘Nothing to hide’: the structural duplicity of the Troubled Families Programme
• References