Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Re-imagining child protection in the context of re-imagining welfare
- three We need to talk about ethics
- four Developing research mindedness in learning cultures
- five Towards a just culture: designing humane social work organisations
- six Getting on and getting by: living with poverty
- seven Thinking afresh about relationships: men, women, parents and services
- eight Tainted love: how dangerous families became troubled
- nine Conclusions
- References
- Index
nine - Conclusions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- one Introduction
- two Re-imagining child protection in the context of re-imagining welfare
- three We need to talk about ethics
- four Developing research mindedness in learning cultures
- five Towards a just culture: designing humane social work organisations
- six Getting on and getting by: living with poverty
- seven Thinking afresh about relationships: men, women, parents and services
- eight Tainted love: how dangerous families became troubled
- nine Conclusions
- References
- Index
Summary
There is a peculiar cycle here: social work investigates suspicious populations, but its investigations, or at least the findings derived from them, make the investigated appear even more suspicious. Investigations provide the warrant for future investigations. Perhaps the additional stigma is necessary because if social workers are to peer into the homes of people who want no part of them, if they are expected to visit the poor despite the latter's articulated desire to be left alone, they need good reasons. Accordingly, the more foreign and perverted clients can be made to appear, the more authority social workers have to visit and keep visiting. Aggressive social work, a social work at war is so much easier with families defined as psychotic, sadomasochistic, rapidly multiplying, polymorphic perverse. (Margolin, 1997: 98)
In his compelling history of the invention of social work in the US, Leslie Margolin describes the importance for the project of state sanctioned social work of constructing the poor as passive and non-reflexive in sharp contrast to the presumed agency and reflexive awareness of the better off. We have shown that this process of ‘othering’ remains central to the current settlement in child protection work. Indeed, it is enjoying a vibrant renaissance.
In this context it has been an important aim of this book to reexamine the language and frameworks used and to address how those currently used have hollowed out important moral and political issues (Ribbens McCarthy, 2013) in their neglect of questions such as the following:
• Why do we use the language of the child and of child protection?
• What is lost and gained by such a language?
• Why is the language of family and family support so marginalised?
• Who is being protected, and from what, in a risk society?
• Given that the focus is overwhelmingly on those families who are multiply deprived, do services reinforce or ameliorate such deprivations?
• Is it ethically desirable to focus on rescuing children and leaving their parents behind in a society riven by inequalities?
• Why do we not explore and engage with mothers and fathers as subjects in their own right?
• Why are relationships between men and women as parents and partners so poorly understood and subject to so little rigorous attention?
• Why do we so often hide the suffering that we encounter behind a rational vocabulary of expertise?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Re-imagining Child ProtectionTowards Humane Social Work with Families, pp. 147 - 158Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2014