Challenging Child Protection

New Directions in Safeguarding Children

Lorraine Waterhouse, Janice McGhee

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781849053952
• eBook ISBN: 9780857007605
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Challenging Child Protection offers a ground-breaking new perspective which will illuminate and improve the professional understanding and practice of social workers and child protection workers.

Taking a fresh look at the principles underlying child protection, this book provides a thought-provoking analysis of the evidence base which underpins professional understanding and intervention. It outlines the ways in which agencies have worked to prevent child abuse and neglect and traces key changes in UK policy, as well as situating these amid wider trends in Europe. With contributions from a wide variety of disciplines, including philosophy and anthropology, this is a uniquely diverse collection of academic perspectives.

This book challenges our conceptions of child protection and encourages readers to think critically about why children are harmed by adults, how society views child abuse and how this informs practice.

PART 1

Challenge One: Examining Preconceptions About Childhood and Harm to Children

CHAPTER 1

The Treatment of Childhood

Walter Lorenz

Modern societies live off the legacy of the Enlightenment, which posited issues of personal freedom and integrity, safeguarded by universal rights, as central reference points for social order and integration. From this notion developed the concept of citizenship guaranteeing civil, political and social rights through which the relationship between individuals and the state became successively regulated (Marshall 1950). At the same time modernism was and still is driven by the desire for humans to gain mastery over phenomena that previously had been considered as ‘fate’ or as effects of ‘nature’ and therefore as inscrutable and haphazard.

The autonomy of the adult individual came to be the ideal of personal, social, economic and political aspirations. The realisation of this project did not, however, proceed in a linear fashion but was always fraught with tensions and indeed contradictions. These relate to the incompatibility of personal autonomy, which implies at least potentially the pluralisation of standpoints and of standards of behaviour, with the universality claimed by rationality and particularly purposeful rationality. According to Weber (1947), standards derived from the latter mark, the advance not just of science and technology in modernity, but also the advance of bureaucracy and its accompanying legal regulations, which impinge progressively on all aspects of life, down to the sphere of the private.

The resulting restrictions on personal liberty are legitimated with reference to the human capacity to argue and to act rationally and hence in accordance with the legal and bureaucratic limits. This implies that non-rational behaviour has no place in modern societies, at least not in the public sphere. Bringing societies to adhere to these standards, to strive for rational standards within which the mature individual can enjoy freedom, is described as the civilising process administered conjointly by the typically modern institutions of policing, of education and to some extent of welfare (Wagner 1994). Yet all those measures have their limits when it comes to respect for the private sphere, where individual standards, convictions, cultural traditions and lifestyles are considered as sacrosanct even when they are seen as irrational.

Children in modernity

In the context of this project, children and the treatment of childhood play a very significant role. On the one hand, a child’s individual course of development from a state of ‘Unmündigkeit ’ (a key term in Kant’s characterisation of what the project of the Enlightenment seeks to overcome, which can be variously translated as ‘tutelage’, ‘minority’, ‘immaturity’ or ‘dependency’) to maturity and autonomy requires an organised educational effort that imparts, imbues or imposes (according to the various pedagogical methods and principles) the ‘right’ standards of a mature society. On the other hand, the unhindered (and only ‘guided’) unfolding of innate individual abilities towards a state of autonomy in full recognition of differences of ability and taste can be seen, from the perspective of reform pedagogy from Pestalozzi to Freire (Oelkers 2005), as the precondition for the development of a free and in that sense truly modern society. And while the establishment of compulsory schooling transferred this dilemma to the level of a public debate over educational methods and national standards in schools, the private and informal dimension of education is still difficult to subsume under such general principles since the family occupies principally the private sphere and hence the realm of freedom and autonomy.

Therefore, in considering issues concerning the welfare of children both in terms of the standards this implies and the methods to ensure the wellbeing of children, two fundamental lines of argument, typical of modernity, collide: from an individualist point of view, the standards according to which children are to be brought up are a private affair where personal, but also religious and other ideological considerations are the responsibility of private families or of private institutions, while from a collectivist point of view, children are already members of society from birth and their upbringing is a matter of public concern. This has to relate to universal standards, standards determined either by the inherent nature of the child or legitimated by the universal standards of reason, which every rational being would apply in caring for children.

The precondition for this was, however, that childhood became a recognised concept and children became publicly visible in their own right (Maynard and Thomas 2009). Before this became possible through the combined political efforts for cultural and legal changes, modernity had first demonstrated its other fundamental ambiguity in relation to children. Rather than including them in the modern aspiration for liberation, children were exposed and subjected to the technical capacity of modernity for ever more pervasive and effective forms of oppression under the dictate of purposeful rationality (Horrell and Humphries 1995). Their exploitation and suffering in the early phases of the industrial revolution was for a long time justified with reference to ‘economic necessity’ and compounded by the absence of ‘voice’ with which at least the oppressed adult could mobilise resistance against their plight (Hindman 2009). Children depended on intermediaries who were a long time coming.

Children between private and public concerns

It is therefore understandable that the possibility of raising issues concerning the plight of children to the level of public attention and debate rested on two conditions: it required recognition for the personhood of children despite their greater dependency on others; and it required a public readiness to argue for legitimate access to the private sphere so that a full picture of what practices lay hidden behind the façade of the private could be obtained. It is furthermore understandable that those mandated to act upon these concerns in the interest of the public are bound to walk into controversy, both from persons representing the private sphere (i.e. the individual families or carers who resent any such interference) and in the eyes of the public itself, which demands adherence to common standards of ‘humane behaviour’ and freedom from state interference at the same time. Here the dilemma of care and control in social services is being acted out in all its irreconcilable contradictions (Hauss 2008).

When in recent decades in many countries the deficits, failures and violations of standards of child welfare in private contexts (of family and of care institutions) were exposed to raise consternation and demands for effective intervention, this signalled a new phase of modernisation and was to some extent the result of the radicalisation of the inherent contradictions of modernity. Globalisation as the phenomenon of the relativising of economic, national and cultural boundaries raises with renewed urgency the question of how universal standards can be squared with individual choices. Global and instant communication facilities create an immediacy that brings the plight of sufferers worldwide to the attention of a virtual community and trigger heightened demands for universal and equal standards of conditions and treatments. Violence in particular touches universal sensibilities, especially when it was hitherto sanctioned by cultural conventions or traditional customs and when it affects women and children. At the same time the value of individual lifestyle choices and the demand for the recognition of differences in the private sphere becomes equally more pronounced and leads to the opposite trend of greater tolerance towards cultural diversity, not least in the choice of types of partnerships and family models. The de-standardisation of family patterns in the wake of these developments has a major and frequently detrimental impact on children’s welfare because of those contradictory developments (Lee 2001).

It is significant that in 2014 the United Nations Children’s Fund produced a report that draws urgent attention to the extent of the suffering children are still exposed to in countries all over the world (United Nations Children’s Fund 2014). It documents not just the continued existence of ‘traditional’ forms of violence against children and young people but also the extension of violence into the new private realms, for instance of the internet, as well as the recognition of previously trivialised forms of violence such as sexual violence, bullying and corporal punishment. At the same time, the report evidences wide discrepancies in the extent to which such forms of violence are being uniformly recognised or condemned, which explains greatly varying rates of reporting.

Beyond childrens’ right

Where a few decades ago the international effort was concentrated on defining universal standards and enshrining them in the form of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations 1989), this latest report is a damning indictment of the ineffectiveness of mere declarations and gives renewed impetus to the critique that this ineffectiveness is directly connected to the presumed universality of the Convention (see Tisdall, Chapter 3, p.43) in addition to profound criticism of the Convention reflecting a typically Western conception of the child (Kaime 2011). Furthermore, while adults and particularly action groups representing the civil rights of adults have been able to make better use of human rights declarations, children themselves cannot form a lobby and cannot therefore gain unmediated access to the core achievements of modernity. They remain largely dependent on advocacy by professionals, activists and politicians and their situation is therefore particularly complex: ‘The universality of childhood and the diversity of children’s real lives are difficult to reconcile’ (Stoecklin and Bonvin 2014, p.8).

The discourse on the universal and equal rights of children appeared to put a definitive line between culturally embedded practices of pre-modern times (see Montgomery, Chapter 2), such as abandoning unwanted or burdensome children in the wilderness, practising paedophilia, chastising children violently or treating them as objects of economic exploitation, and a modern conception of childhood as a protected space, a moratorium in which children enjoyed equal recognition of their freedom to grow. But it became equally apparent that cultural differences could not be eliminated or ignored under conditions of modernity as the emphasis on religious freedom for instance shields practices like circumcision of boys or genital mutilation of girls from legal sanctions in some jurisdictions. Even the debate on abortion and the rights of the unborn child can be seen as part of this controversy and demonstrates the limits that references to universal rationality or to normativity derived from medical evidence pose on effective interventions (Cornock and Montgomery 2011).

The contrast between universality and relativity in relation to childhood is compounded by the difference between a psychological and a sociological perspective. The reference to psychological ‘constants’ in terms of culture-independent needs of children at the various stages of psychological development has helped underpin efforts in applying human rights to children. Two developments came together in this regard.

Recognising child abuse

On the medical side new and convincing evidence was collected on the nature of particular child injuries observed by medical staff in emergency situations. This led to the identification and diagnostic application of what was provocatively termed the ‘battered child syndrome’ (Kempe et al. 1962) after previous references to ‘non-accidental injuries’ had received little public attention (Krugman and Korbin 2013). The framing of such incidents as a ‘syndrome’ triggered a painful process of gradual realisation that the advent of ‘modern, civilised societies’ had not spelled the end of inhumane childrearing practices. And under conditions of modernity it was not sufficient to attribute this to ‘moral failings’ on the part of the perpetrators; their behaviour called for scientific explanations.

Therefore the systematic medical study and classification of child abuse and neglect was paralleled on the child psychology side by the pioneering work on early attachment around John Bowlby (1977, 1985), which evidenced the long-term effects of bond disruption, both for infant and caregivers. Looking back on the research of the Henry Kempe Centre, Ryan writes:

In discovering the ability to foresee the risk of serious physical abuse within the first hours and days of an infant’s interaction with the caregiver, the protective properties of secure attachment became evident. In time, the understanding that abuse is, at its core, a disorder of attachment emerged. (Ryan 2013, p.17)

These research findings placed the damaging effects of physical, emotional and sexual maltreatment of children inescapably not just in the professional but also in the public domain. On the basis of the pressure for changes in practices generated by them, they gradually found entry not just into professional childcare and protection practices in many countries with advanced social welfare systems, but they were also taken up by legislation and the practice of family law courts. The concern for the continuity of care in particular, most vociferously expressed by a Freudian group of psychoanalysts with their seminal book Beyond the Best Interest of the Child (Goldstein, Freud and Solnit 1973), led to faster decisions when placing children in care, or in divorce procedures.

Decision-makers relied on the availability of ‘hard evidence’ concerning the risks associated with children remaining in precarious care arrangements and interpreted ‘the best interest of the child’ in terms of the permanency of secure (alternative or still existing natural) bonds. Equipped with such ‘positive findings’ and the corresponding diagnostic tools in the form of lists of indicators, social services in many countries embarked on a systematic review of family cases in collaboration with schools and medical services in order to obtain a full picture of ‘children at risk’.

Risk reduction and modern insecurity

But precisely these developments brought the contradictory nature of modernity’s rational-purposeful approach to problem solving to the surface in as much as the positivist paradigm on which it is based inevitably brought with it a concentration of power on expert systems at the expense of personal (and indeed also professional) liberty. The legal backing of child protection interventions, which gave professionals the power to investigate private family matters more effectively, paradoxically led to a weakening of the position of professionals who were once used to exercising professional discretion on the basis of their expert knowledge and who were now increasingly constrained to follow procedures in order to keep their decisions within legal parameters.

In the light of cases of suspected abuse not being followed up, several countries introduced ‘at risk registers’ with the result that for instance in Australia up to one in five children will be the subject of a child protection notification before they reach the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Challenging Child Protection and Safeguarding Children
• Part 1 Challenge One: Examining Preconceptions About Childhood and Harm to Children
• Part 2 Challenge Two: Reviewing the Evidence
• Part 3 Challenge Three: Working with Children and Families
• Contributor Profiles
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index