In the UK, mental health services for adults and child care social work both owe much of their current structures to a preoccupation with risk. Mental health services are principally concerned with the risks that their user group may pose to the general public. In contrast, child care social work focuses on the risks to which children, the service's primary client group, are exposed by others. The development of both services can be depicted as a struggle between the demand that risk be contained or reduced and normalising ideologies such as community care and family support. Recent emphasis on the rights of users and their families in the face of professional expertise and authority has also contributed to the dynamic process of service development.

Beck (1992) defines the preoccupation with risk as a key feature of modernity. Whereas in other settings risk taking may have positive connotations, in the context of health and social care, risk tends to be defined negatively and its outcomes are conceptualised as harm or danger (Alaszewski, 2002). A social policy analysis traces the centrality of risk in both child care social work and mental health services to the influence of a series of public inquiries during the last two decades of the 20th century (Stanley and Manthorpe, 2004). At the time of writing, the capacity of inquiries to shape services is apparent in the anticipated organisational changes in child care services that have been stimulated by the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié (Laming, 2003). The extent to which inquiries and the public response to them have driven policy is analysed in depth elsewhere (Parton, 1985; Parton, 1991; McCulloch and Parker, 2004: forthcoming; Munro, 2004: forthcoming). However, the influence of the inquiries has had to contend with other imperatives, including concerns about the intrusion of the state into the private sphere and an emphasis on the community or family as the locus of care for vulnerable individuals.