HUMAN SERVICE ACTORS face the world with imagined identities built on good intentions and high ideals, while simultaneously casting a deep and sinister shadow. These reflexive human service images are constructed around and promulgated through the aspirational language of professional literature and education, codes of ethics, principles undergirding social policies, organisations' mission statements, standards of practice and individual belief systems. Identities are understandably articulated through lofty rhetoric, stamped with a leitmotif of human rights and social justice. These concepts are both the ostensible rationale for, and drivers of, much human services policy and system, organisation, program and worker activity. The slogan ‘duty of care’ peppers the lexicon of the human services. Under this honourable banner – but often based on an imperfect understanding of its legal meaning, limitations and implications – the human services march with confidence in the integrity of their endeavours.

The shadow world on the other hand is declaimed through commissions, reviews, enquiries, inquests, court cases, complaints mechanisms, advocacy groups, victims' stories, the media and popular books. It is inhabited by tales of extensive, sustained and repeated neglect, cruelty and maltreatment in institutional and community services. Vulnerable groups in society – the mentally ill, children, adolescents, aged people, prisoners, Indigenous people, asylum seekers and the disabled – are in this world routinely abused and neglected by service systems, agencies and workers in the realm of the human services.