Childhood and Youth

Clapton, Gary, Gary Clapton

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781447321941
• eBook ISBN: 9781447321958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Childhood and youth have often been the targets of moral panic rhetoric. This Byte explores a series of pressing concerns about young people: child abuse, child pornography, child sexual exploitation, child trafficking and the concept of childhood. With an appraisal of the work of the influential thinker, Geoffrey Pearson, who wrote on deviance and young people, it draws attention to the moralising within these discourses and asks how we might do things differently.

ONE

Child protection and moral panic

Ian Butler

Introduction

A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to. (Cohen, 1972, p 9)

As well as providing an enduring and invaluable analytical tool for understanding the politics of control and the manufacture of social order, in this definition of a moral panic Cohen also inadvertently captured almost exactly how working in child protection has felt for the last 30 years. The majority of the children’s workforce would recognise the sense of threat; the over-simplifications; the moral outrage; the endless and seemingly futile attempts to ‘never let this happen again’ and the many, many ways in which countless experts have pointed out how the job might be better done.

This chapter will argue that by applying Cohen’s analysis to the social practice of child protection, particularly to those cases that achieve the status of a national ‘scandal’, we can learn far more about the politics of welfare and the state’s relationship to troubled and troublesome families than we can ever learn about how to look after vulnerable children. In particular, it will explore how iconic child deaths can be used to construct a ‘condition, episode, person or group of persons … defined as a threat to societal values and interests’ – the idea at the core of what is implied by Cohen’s formulation of a moral panic.

Learning from our mistakes

This is not to wholly set aside the improvements in child-protection practice that have derived from the innumerable public inquiry reports, Serious Case Reviews and Individual Management Reviews that have been published over the last 30 years. I would suggest, however, that the gains are increasingly marginal, except in so far as they promote compliance with existing protocols, as most such reports have become formulaic and repetitive.

One might even argue, particularly in relation to the more widely known cases, that they have had the opposite effect as far as protecting children is concerned. For example, the cumulative effect of reporting child abuse by reference only to its most notorious failures, often involving the death of a child, is to reinforce the view that child abuse is sporadic, dramatic and perpetrated only by monsters. We know, on the other hand, that much child abuse is systemic, incredibly ordinary in many ways and perpetrated across the whole social and psychological spectrum.

The consequence of this is that, for at least 30 years, public, political and professional focus has remained on the mechanisms of regulation rather than on the mechanisms of causation as far as child abuse is concerned. Public policy focuses much more on the training and management of the workforce than it does on the causes and correlates of child abuse; practitioners talk about ‘safeguarding’ but less about ‘promoting welfare’ (see section 17 of the Children Act 1989) and the popular imagination focuses on the failures of social workers much more frequently than on the failures of the political and social contexts in which they operate.

Where the study of such cases is more useful, perhaps, is in what they tell us about the contemporary state of social work as a form of social practice and about how certain individuals and families are understood and managed by the state. It is in this sense that they can be understood, as per Cohen’s original definition, if not as a form, then as instruments of moral panic and, in that sense, part of the politics of control.

Scandals

I have described elsewhere (Butler and Drakeford, 2003; 2005) how scandals are not haphazard events that arise from specific, exceptional practice failures. Rather, they are very likely – if not inevitable – only in very particular circumstances, and they arise, build and subside in a consistent and predictable way.

They arise and fall at key points of transition in societal values and interests and at specific moments in the transition of public policy affecting certain groups of individuals and families; in short, at points of major upheaval in the nature, scope and operation of the welfare state. By the same token, where there is no fundamental tension in a particular policy field or in the societal attitudes and values in which it is embedded, there are no scandals – no matter how grievously young people may suffer. Where scandals do not occur is just as interesting as where they do. For example, broadly speaking, the youth justice ‘arms race’ since the mid-1990s, whereby successive governments have sought to be tougher on crime and criminals than their predecessors, has met with little opposition, and despite over 20 years of Chief Inspector of Prisons Reports that testify to the endemic bullying, atrocious living conditions and ill-treatment of children and young adults in custody there has been hardly a trace of scandal (Drakeford and Butler, 2007).

It is important therefore to distinguish between the underlying events that form the basis of a scandal and the scandal itself. Scandals do not happen because children die or are seriously harmed at the hands of their parents or those responsible for their care. These may be necessary conditions, but they are far from sufficient.

Children die at the hands of those who are supposed to be looking after them almost every week of the year, every year. These deaths are certainly tragedies, but they are not scandals. Almost all such child deaths remain known to only a small number of relatives and professionals. In that sense, by far the majority of child deaths remain within the relatively private domain. Scandals occur when such routine, almost domestic affairs, become public property in a way that excites sustained or intense interest and that calls for explanation.

Scandals are formed from highly selected cases. It is true that events that become scandalised will often share certain common characteristics; ‘pantomime’ heroes and villains; a degree of foreignness or the exotic; an element of the macabre; a contradiction between the scene of the scandal and the ostensible purpose of such places (for example, a child is not supposed to be injured by its parents, harmed by its doctor and so on), but even these are not necessary.

In any case, this is not a complete definition of a scandal. So far the events would amount to no more than ‘news’ and not every child death even makes it into the news. For what might amount to a no more than a news story to become a scandal, the underlying events somehow have to come to be regarded as symptomatic or emblematic of something far more widespread than the specific instance.

What is odd, though, is that what is newsworthy to a wider audience and potential material for a scandal might not appear in the least bit wrong or unusual to those on the ‘inside’. In almost all of the welfare scandals since 1965, the events described are to many of those closest to them no more than simply business as usual. What happens is that the events that lie at the core of a scandal take on a significance and a set of meanings that were not obvious to those most closely associated with them. Many of these meanings derive from the underlying, subterranean policy pressures and the transformations that are underway; although they may also become the site across which a whole variety of political and moral hobby-horses are ridden. A number of these have been described in detail elsewhere – the death penalty in Colwell or latent racism in Climbié, for example (Butler and Drakeford, 2003; 2005; 2011).

In that sense, scandals don’t just happen, and certainly they don’t just happen because things ‘go wrong’ – things go wrong every day. Scandals are constructed. New meanings are applied to events that are quite different to those applied to the same events by those who inhabit the world in which the scandal originates – it is at this point that the connection between iconic child deaths and Cohen’s fundamental account of a moral panic becomes more obvious.

Even when the underlying events are quite clearly outrages in any terms (such as murder or sexual abuse), in order to be scandalised, the events have to be transformed from the familiar and mundane into the public and symbolic, and for that, sustained interest from wider constituencies of interest is critical. That process of transformation begins with discovery. Someone becomes aware of certain events and wants something done about them. They might be a whistle-blower from within an institution, the relative of someone affected by the events at the core of the scandal or a complete outsider with an agenda of their own.

Discovery is not enough, however. The audience for the discovery needs to be widened. The public have to hear and have their interest engaged, and here the media have an important part to play in the construction of a scandal. This presupposes that there is an audience for the scandal. This goes to the heart of the scandalising process, especially when one considers that the events that lie at the heart of a scandal might have gone on for years.

‘Why does this matter now?’ is the most important question to answer in understanding any scandal. It is at this point that we begin to get a sense of what the fundamental issues are, of which the scandal is merely the outward representation.

One of the key players in the scandal process is the Public Inquiry. Inquiries should not be seen as neutral events. Almost all of them are set up apparently to ‘establish the facts’, but in doing so the Inquiry is itself an active player in the struggle to make sense of what has happened, adding its own voice to the construction of events. The reports that they produce, the most enduring record of the ‘truth’ of what happened, in their choice of language, tone and internal structure can add or change our understanding of what the ‘facts’ were.

Elsewhere and at greater length than this chapter will permit, Mark Drakeford and I have provided many examples of why certain scandals appear and disappear and try to locate them in their sociopolitical context (Butler and Drakeford, 2003; 2005). One of the threads that we have tried to follow in our work is what successive scandals tell us about the state of social work at a particular time. In the Colwell case (Butler and Drakeford, 2011), for example, it was precisely the arriviste and potentially dangerous profession of social work that was ‘on trial’. More broadly, however, beyond the tragic circumstances of one child in a particular family, in the hands of Sir Keith Joseph and, later, David Owen, Barbara Castle, James Callaghan and Harold Wilson, the case became an opportunity by which a new set of relationships between the state and its more troubled and troubling families was debated and a site where the architecture of the welfare state was reconfigured in the face of the economic necessities of the 1970s, rather than the 1948 consensus on which it had been built.

While other tensions were debated, such as the death penalty or where the balance should fall in relation to ‘tug-of-love’ cases, the Colwell scandal was essentially about the difference between a ‘problem family’ and a ‘family with problems’ and how the state, and its social workers in particular, should respond in the post-Seebohm, oil-crisis, three-day-week world in which the Colwell case was constructed. It may be worth recalling that it was the Colwell case that paved the way for the first wave of virulent antisocial work media coverage that ran through the reporting of the inquiries into the deaths of Heidi Koseda, Kimberley Carlile and Tyra Henry that clustered after the Jasmine Beckford case and that continued, with occasional lulls, right through the 1980s to the Cleveland Inquiry – a period that saw what one commentator called the emergence of the ‘peculiarly British sport of social worker baiting’ (Greenland, 1986, p 164).

In terms of Cohen’s initial formulation, in this wave of moral panic it was the practice and practitioners of social work as well as certain types of ‘problem’ family that were clearly identified as the ‘condition, episode, person or group of persons’ that had emerged ‘to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’.

Peter Connelly and the politics of neoliberalism

The most recent iconic case, that of Peter Connelly, speaks to another set of sociopolitical stresses: the identification of new ‘threats’ and a new set of moral barricades to erect. In this instance, the process of discovery and the generation of the scandal apparently owed more to the press than to an inquiry, a court judgment or a specific ‘outsider’ (but see Jones, 2014 for a compelling and disturbing account of the web of political and journali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Series editors’ preface
• Introduction
• 1 Child protection and moral panic
• 2 Unearthing melodrama: moral panic theory and the enduring characterisation of child trafficking
• 3 Lost childhood?
• 4 Internet risk research and child sexual abuse: a misdirected moral panic?
• 5 The Rotherham abuse scandal
• Afterword