Protecting Children in Time, or Failing To: Child Abuse, Child Protection and Modernity

Abstract

There is a vitally important mode of modern work experience we know as child protection. It is to be part of a vast division of labour in a welfare state. It is an experience of time and space, of working simultaneously in public and private realms, of hourly home visits, office interviews, medical consultations, the working day, and weekends. Of being part of large faceless bureaucracies that have the power to enter people’s lives, their homes, communities and to tear them apart by taking children into care, but only at the same time as it is to embody resources, initiatives and sources of strength which can also enable people, families and communities to pull together, to prevent them falling apart, to live to fight bureaucracy another day. It is thus an experience of power and control, but equally of caring and compassion: of helping and tending for others, of relieving the suffering of children and often their parents and other carers, many of whom no one else wants to know; of talking, listening, group meetings and often boring bureaucratic routine; of being blamed for the deaths of children or in other ways getting it wrong, and being made accountable and subjected to managerial guidance and control.