Protecting Children in Time

Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity

Harry Ferguson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781403906922
• eBook ISBN: 9780230006249
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Protecting Children in Time provides a highly original analysis of the origins and development of the taken-for-granted notion that it is possible through social intervention to protect children from avoidable harm and even death, to protect children in time. By using case-studies which span the past 120 years of 'modern' practices and drawing on the work of leading social theorists of modernity and risk society it provides a new way of thinking about constructions of child abuse as a social problem and child protection as a late-modern expert system and experience. It proposes new ways of conceptualizing relationships between professionals, children at risk and families and deepens our understanding of what effective interventions have to involve.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Protecting Children in Time, or Failing To: Child Abuse, Child Protection and Modernity
• 2 Taking it Onto the Streets: The Discovery of Child Death and Birth of Child Protection, 1870–1914
• 3 The Smell of Practice: Child Protection, the Body and the Experience of Modernity
• 4 From Day-to-Day Quietly and Without Fuss: Child Protection, Simple Modernity and the Repression of Knowledge of Child Death, 1914–70
• 5 Child Physical Abuse and the Return of Death Since the 1970s: Child Protection, Risk and Reflexive Modernization
• 6 Child Sexual Abuse and the Reflexive Project of the Self: Child Protection, Individualization and Life Politics
• 7 Into Another World: Child Neglect, Multi-problem Families and the Psychosocial Dynamics of Late-modern Child Protection
• 8 Liquid Welfare: Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index