Children, Welfare and the State

Barry Goldson, Michael Lavalette, Jim McKechnie, Barry Goldson, Michael Lavalette, Jim McKechnie

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780761972334, 9780761972327
• eBook ISBN: 9781446224366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

`A good foundation for those intent on further research? - ChildRight

`It is intelligent, lively, clear, and well written? - Professor Hugh Cunningham, University of Kent at Canterbury

`This is an excellent source book which is up-to-date and covers key debates on childhood in an accessible way? - Professor Andy Furlong, University of Glasgow

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the study of `children? and `childhood? within the social sciences. Children, Welfare and the State provides readers with a comprehensive critical introduction to modern childhood studies.

In addition to engaging with the broad theoretical debates within the `new? sociology of childhood and developmental psychology the book:

- Explores key questions in relation to researching childhood, children?s agency and social constructionist perspectives;

- Traces historical and contemporary developments in social policy responses to children and childhood;

- Examines the primary sites of state intervention in regulating and shaping children?s lives.

- Re-states the primary significance of social class and other structural divisions in understanding children?s experiences of childhood;

- Systematically assesses the impact of inequality and poverty on children and childhood.

Children, Welfare and the State has been tailored to appeal to those studying children and childhood within social policy, sociology, psychology, criminology, history, social work and youth and community work courses.

ONE

Children, Welfare and the State: An Introduction

BARRY GOLDSON

This book is primarily intended for undergraduate students engaged in the broad area of childhood and youth studies. Increasing numbers of students and academics alike are developing interests in this area of scholarship across a wide disciplinary spectrum. Furthermore, in addition to taught courses there is a thriving research agenda in the field, together with sustained interest in policy analysis and the impact of state policy formation specific to children and young people. Such developments are not confined to the UK and are being replicated elsewhere. Indeed, in many important respects international standards, treaties and rules – perhaps most notably the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – have served to energise such academic study and research across a global context.

Set against this backdrop there is also a relatively far-reaching sense of unease in the UK in relation to children and young people, or with regard to certain constituencies of children and young people to be more precise. Such concern takes various forms. Many commentators have argued that children’s rights are unduly limited and their opportunities to actively participate in civic life is unnecessarily circumscribed. Others have suggested that children have too many rights and claim that this has led to indiscipline and a diminishing sense of respect within the young. On the one hand there is an increasing awareness of extensive child poverty in the UK despite relative national prosperity, and this has served to mobilise action and raise fundamental questions with regard to social justice and child welfare. On the other hand, Jeffs and Smith (1996) have suggested that adult anxieties have rumbled uncomfortably in recent years in tandem with the ‘widespread belief’ that children and young people ‘are in some way turning feral’ and this has led to calls for greater controls, stricter discipline and ultimately harsher punishment. Indeed, the populist notion that a ‘crisis’ besets contemporary childhood, necessitating firm action, is not uncommon (Scraton, 1997).

This book addresses many of the complex and competing issues that increasingly exercise the minds of students, academics, policy-makers, professional practitioners, parents, members of the public and children and young people alike, questions, that is, that relate directly to children, welfare and the state.

In Chapter 2 Lavalette and Cunningham engage with some of the most pressing contemporary sociological debates in relation to children and childhood. They begin with two primary questions: who are children and what is childhood, questions which can serve to unsettle and disturb otherwise fixed ideas and domain assumptions. The chapter identifies polarised conceptualisations of childhood: from the idealised notion of a carefree period of protected insulation from the harshness of the adult world, to a decidedly more austere abstraction which portrays children as an oppressed people subject to adult domination and coercion. Lavalette and Cunningham proceed to distinguish universalistic conceptualisations from those which emphasise spatial and temporal specificities and the ‘moving image’ of childhood. Moreover, the determining contexts of class, ‘race’ and gender are examined and the differentiated experiences of children, contingent upon structural relations, are illustrated and discussed. The chapter summarises the principal arguments that have been developed within classical historical accounts of childhood before assessing the divergent theoretical priorities characteristic of the ‘new sociology’. In this latter endeavour Lavalette and Cunningham critically assess the different theoretical strains that are rooted in, and informed by, relations between socio-economic structure and individual agency on the one hand, and postmodernist paradigms on the other. The authors conclude by re-stating the primacy of social class in determining children’s experiences of childhood, a theme which features both implicitly and explicitly throughout the book.

In Chapter 3 Hobbs too engages in debate with the ‘new’ sociologists of childhood, particularly in respect to the contribution that psychology has made, and can make, to comprehending children and childhood. Indeed, Hobbs argues that some of the ‘new sociologists’ have tended to essentialise and over-simplify psychology and have neglected to recognise the diversity of psychological perspectives and approaches. Furthermore, Hobbs contends that such apparent reductionism has served to misrepresent the work of prominent psychologists including Piaget and Freud, and to misunderstand the psychologists’ appreciation of the significance of children’s agency. Hobbs analyses examples of applied psychological research which have directly benefited certain constituencies of children. In this respect the argument returns to the problems associated with an homogenised conceptualisation of childhood, as previously raised by Lavalette and Cunningham. Indeed, the importance of recognising the differentiated nature of childhood experience is illustrated by reference to children with autism, and Hobbs sets out a persuasive case with regard to the contribution of psychology in this respect. Ultimately Hobbs appeals for a more integrated, and less fragmented and mono-discipline-oriented social science in relation to the development of childhood studies.

In Chapter 4 McKechnie traces a convergence of developments which have combined to shape and influence the direction of contemporary empirical research into children and childhood. In this sense it is argued that international standards, treaties and rules (perhaps most notably the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child), together with the provisions of domestic statute, increasingly emphasise the child’s right to express an opinion. More importantly, however, the same legal instruments provide that children’s opinions should be taken into account in any matter of procedure that might affect them. McKechnie observes that the policies, procedures and practices of many non-governmental organisations have been particularly influenced by such developments, and so too have academic researchers (including the ‘new sociologists’ of childhood) in their quest to seek the ‘voice of the child’. McKechnie welcomes the new emphasis on children’s agency and the ‘actor-status’ of the child, together with the overall methodological priority to engage with the child as subject as distinct from mere object of inquiry. However, he also explicitly recognises the practical and methodological complexities of actually reaching, understanding, interpreting and applying ‘children’s voices’ to the development of knowledge in ways that are robust and defensible. In considering such issues McKechnie critically assesses the respective merits and deficits of qualitative and quantitative research approaches, illustrating both by reference to practical examples. He also explores the technical, epistemological and ideological imperatives that influence methodological preferences and specific research designs, and he makes a case for a synthesis of methods (and academic disciplines) which most appropriately suit the specificities of circumstance in researching children and childhood.

Taken together, Chapters 2–4 therefore address and critically examine some of the ‘big’ questions in relation to the study of children and childhood: contemporary developments in sociological and psychological theorisation and research, together with an assessment of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. The remaining chapters serve to narrow the focus and identify the significance of major aspects of social policy and state agency responses with regard to specific elements of childhood experience and/or particular constituencies of children. Here the emphasis is placed on rich children, poor children, those in school and subject to formal education, those engaged in work and labour, those ‘looked after’ by the state, those in conflict with the law, those who endure violation and abuse from adults, those whose sexuality and sexual identity are circumscribed and regulated, and finally those who mobilise particular forms of resistance.

In Chapter 5 therefore, Novak re-engages with the notion of differentiated childhood by addressing the primacy of social class and the contrasting experiences of children living in a grossly unequal and deeply divided Britain. Whereas child poverty and social exclusion feature prominently on the respective agendas of government departments, state agencies and the panoply of non-governmental organisations, Novak argues that the analytic, policy and practice emphasis tends to treat poor children in isolation. This chapter rectifies such partiality by examining the relation between poverty and wealth and by starkly juxtaposing the respective fortunes of poor children and rich children. Novak contends that although the post-war period of reconstruction and the emergence of the welfare state offered some relief from the excesses of inequality and injustice, the consolidation of neo-liberalism and the social consequences of a completely unbridled free-market economy have re-established patterns of acute social and economic polarisation over the past two decades. Within this context childhood is divided and compartmentalised along class lines and by focusing upon health and education in particular, Novak examines the disadvantages of poor children with the contrasting privileges of their rich counterparts. The analysis exposes both the limitations of monolithic conceptualisations of childhood together with the profound impediments of the New Labour government’s approach to eradicating child poverty.

In Chapter 6 Maitles further develops the theme of class-based inequality with specific regard to children’s education. Here it is argued that the relation between poverty and disadvantage on the one hand, and educational under-achievement on the other, is well-established within social scientific research and education practice experience. Notwithstanding this, however, Maitles contends that the primary implications of such a relation are being neglected within contemporary education policy and practice which has been witness to significant shifts in emphasis in recent years. He argues that in this respect earlier (and to a certain extent effective) efforts to address educational inequalities by means of comprehensive schools, reduced class sizes and improved staff-pupil ratios, have been supplanted by increasingly managerialist and market-oriented techniques ostensibly targeted at improving efficiency and effectiveness. Consequently children are being subjected to increasing assessment and tests, schools are having to contend with crude performance inspections which gauge their success or otherwise in meeting externally imposed targets, and the educational system is facing burgeoning deregulation as private business interests steadily assert their influence. Not unlike Novak, Maitles contrasts the generous educational resources and privileges that are available to certain constituencies of children with the hardships and rations that are endured by others. Furthermore, despite the rhetoric of the New Labour government and its associated pro-education claims, Maitles detects little evidence to suggest that access to educational opportunities is a right that the children of the poor can expect to enjoy.

There is a certain irony in the observation that state education, which Novak and Maitles each regard as failing significant proportions of working-class children at the beginning of the twenty-first century, essentially served to ‘rescue’ such children from exploitative employment relations during the 19th century. Indeed, in Chapter 7 Stack and McKechnie trace the historical processes and key policy developments which have effectively re-situated children’s ‘place’ from work and wage labour to school and state education. This re-situating resonates with the social constructionist concepts that Lavalette and Cunningham introduced in Chapter 2 and it reveals the means by which conceptualisations of children and childhood change over time and space. Notwithstanding this, however, Stack and McKechnie argue that child employment legislation and associated regulatory policies and practices have largely been ineffective. Indeed, by referring to various research studies they demonstrate that work is neither a marginal nor a particularly safe activity for children. Children are engaged in a wide variety of work practices within which they are largely under-paid and under-protected. Stack and McKechnie begin to unravel many of the complex issues relating to child employment including its relation to children’s educational performance. They conclude the chapter by suggesting that notwithstanding the methodological complexities (as considered by McKechnie in Chapter 4), the processes of gleaning greater understanding of working children necessitates engaging with the ‘voice’ of such children themselves.

In Chapter 8 Jones traces the key policy milestones that have shaped the development of state responses to the welfare needs of the most disadvantaged children and young people. In common with previous chapters social class is central to the analysis and it is argued that state social work in Britain has always been a class-specific activity. By initially focusing upon the Children Acts of 1908 and 1948 Jones contends that post-war policy developments can be seen to represent a departure – albeit qualified and tentative – from what he terms the ‘purposeful neglect’ of that which had gone before. Notwithstanding this, Jones argues that formal state welfare is ultimately driven by instrumental purpose (economic imperatives, regulation and the maintenance of order) as distinct from intrinsic human concern and compassion. As the demand for labour and a healthy and educated mass workforce has receded in recent years Jones detects that rehabilitative ideals and the ostensible rationality of therapeutic casework have equally diminished within state social work. Instead, the practices of restriction, regulation, surveillance and control have gained ascendancy. Not unlike Novak in Chapter 5, Jones contends that New Labour has determinedly refused to abandon neo-liberal priorities. Furthermore, within this macro context, and despite the best and most genuine efforts of many social work practitioners at the micro level, it is argued that the children of the poor have their rights routinely violated and their needs denied along a state social work continuum extending from indifference at one end to abject abuse at the other.

In Chapter 9 I focus attention on children in conflict with the law, and on the historical development of policy and state agency practice with regard to such children. The chapter engages with a number of key issues that are raised throughout the book. First, the means by which children who ‘offend’ are socially constructed. Are they to be seen primarily as ‘children’ or as ‘offenders’? How do the identities that are ascribed to them impact upon and influence the construction of policy and the formal responses of state agencies? Second, the relationship between socio-economic structure and individual agency. Are the children who come to the attention of state agencies as child offenders (most of whom are drawn from the most disadvantaged sections of the working class) to be conceptualised as ‘deprived’ or ‘depraved’? Third, the tensions between welfare, care and supportive advocacy on the one hand, and punishment, control and subordinating regulation on the other. What political priorities, economic interests and ideological imperatives impact upon policy and practice responses to children in trouble? Not unlike Jones’s analysis of contemporary developments within state social work, the concluding observations of this chapter identify a burgeoning mood of impatience and intolerance in relation to children in trouble and a corresponding proclivity to subject them to increasingly repressive modes of governance and regulation.

In Chapter 10 Corby explicitly focuses upon the abuses endured by many children together with the formal apparatus comprising the child protection system. Earlier chapters have raised a range of discomforting doubts with regard to the benign intent of state policy and the deficiencies of agency practices. Corby too engages with such concerns, and in providing a historical review of child protection policy development he critically examines the complex and competing (even contradictory) priorities that have exercised influence in this field. The relation between the state and the family is central to Corby’s analysis within which the respective rights, duties and responsibilities of state agencies, parents and children are negotiated and settled. Dominant conceptualisations of the caring and protective capacities of adults with regard to children are challenged as Corby considers various forms of violation: sexual abuse; physical abuse; emotional and psychological abuse; organised and ritualised abuses; and cruelty and neglect. Moreover, the chapter considers child abuse both within and outwith families including the violation of children ‘looked after’ in public care, and in so doing it connects with a number of issues raised by Jones’s critical analysis of state social work. Corby also addresses the structural contexts within which child abuse is located and examines gender relations together with the impact of class and poverty, further developing and applying some of the core themes which run across the book.

In Chapter 11 Haydon and Scraton further develop the critical assessment of the state-‘family’ relation. Here it is initially argued that moral reductionism has displaced material context in dominant contemporary analyses of the sexual behaviour of children and young people. This particularly applies to the tendency to problematise and morally scold teenage pregnancies, the ‘irresponsible’ sexual behaviours of children and young people, and the (working-class) families (even communities) within which they live. Haydon and Scraton provide an overview of policy developments in relation to formal sex and sexuality education within which they critically interrogate its politics and underpinning priorities. They argue that although certain progressive shifts in contemporary approaches to such education are discernible (within which crude medico-biological emphases are being replaced with a more holistic health orientation embracing personal and social education), reactionary domain assumptions continue to prevail. In this sense Haydon and Scraton identify the hegemonic symbolic presence of conjugal family forms, marriage, parenthood and ‘conventional’ gendered relations; the normalisation of heterosexual relations and the reproductive imperative; and the corresponding marginalisation (if not moral condemnation) of gay and lesbian sexualities. Furthermore, they argue that the omnipresent construction of childhood ‘innocence’ and vulnerability serves to legitimise the ‘protection’ of children and the regulation of their formal sex and sexuality education in ways which control and confine them and profoundly circumscribe their rights.

Chapters 5–11, therefore, essentially examine the means by which sta...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 Children, Welfare and the State: An Introduction Barry Goldson
• Chapter 2 The Sociology of Childhood Michael Lavalette and Stephen Cunningham
• Chapter 3 New Sociology and Old Psychology Sandy Hobbs
• Chapter 4 Children’s Voices and Researching Childhood Jim McKechnie
• Chapter 5 Rich Children, Poor Children Tony Novak
• Chapter 6 Children and Education: Inequalities in Our Schools Henry Maitles
• Chapter 7 Working Children Niamh Stack and Jim McKechnie
• Chapter 8 Children, Class and the Threatening State Chris Jones
• Chapter 9 Children, Crime and the State Barry Goldson
• Chapter 10 Child Abuse and Child Protection Brian Corby
• Chapter 11 Sex Education as Regulation Deena Haydon and Phil Scraton
• Chapter 12 Children, Politics and Collective Action: School Strikes in Britain Stephen Cunningham and Michael Lavalette
• Chapter 13 Childhood: Themes and Issues Jim McKechnie
• Bibliography
• Index