Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Glossary of Māori words
- About the author
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Power structures and problem definition
- 2 Origins of child protection in Aotearoa
- 3 Post-war child welfare
- 4 The 1980s: a storm builds and breaks
- 5 Revolution from above: the neoliberal turn
- 6 Cycles of crisis and review
- 7 Building a new paradigm
- Notes
- References
- Index
4 - The 1980s: a storm builds and breaks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Glossary of Māori words
- About the author
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Power structures and problem definition
- 2 Origins of child protection in Aotearoa
- 3 Post-war child welfare
- 4 The 1980s: a storm builds and breaks
- 5 Revolution from above: the neoliberal turn
- 6 Cycles of crisis and review
- 7 Building a new paradigm
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
The child protection imperative
Awareness of child abuse grew internationally from the mid-1960s. Aotearoa was no exception. Initially focused on the deliberate physical injury of children, child protection has developed to include ever-widening categories of concern (Gilbert, 2012). The visibility of intrafamilial abuse reflects a change of consciousness towards children's rights that can be aligned with the wider post-war human rights discourse, particularly the political ascendancy of women's rights, the so-called ‘second wave of feminism’:
The broad influence of feminist politics has been important in focusing attention on the rights of children to be free of violence and abuse. Layers of taboo have been peeled back. Societal acknowledgement of physical abuse in the 1960s has grown to embrace awareness of sexual victimization of children, more latterly the abuse of boys as well as girls. (Hyslop, 1997: 61)
The child protection project is also generally traced to the pioneering research work of the American paediatrician Henry Kempe and associates, specifically, their ‘discovery’ of the battered child syndrome (Scott, 2006). The focus on diagnosis and treatment associated with Kempe's work has arguably set the enduring template for a forensic approach to the investigation and assessment of suspected child abuse:
The modern child protection system emerged from a concern to stop babies dying or being ‘battered’ by parents who were considered to be suffering from a lack of empathic mothering in their own lives. Poverty, bad housing and so on were screened out as holding helpful explanatory value (Parton, 1985). … Despite all the changes, the story honed in the 1960s has proved remarkably resilient in its stress on the actions of individual parents/carer, and its focus on the intra-familial as the locus of cause and consequence. (Featherstone et al, 2017: 191)
Professional interest in the cross-disciplinary management of child abuse came to a head in the late 1970s in Aotearoa (Garlick, 2012: 102). This movement clashed with increasingly politicised concerns about the alienating effect of state care for Māori. The resulting friction precipitated a protracted dispute between the claims of social workers to the ‘expert’ role in child protection and the claims of other disciplines, particularly the medical profession.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Political History of Child ProtectionLessons for Reform from Aotearoa New Zealand, pp. 68 - 90Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2022