The Smell of Practice: Child Protection, the Body and the Experience of Modernity

Abstract

The importance of the account I am seeking to offer in this book is that it does not only constitute a socio-historical argument and corrective to standard accounts of the history of child protection. It paves the way for a grounded theoretical account of how modern child protection is constituted, based on more accurate representations of the emergence and development of its practices. I have shown how, by the first decades of the twentieth century, child protection came into being in terms of the emergence of administrative powers to protect children and the manner in which those practices began to focus upon a concept of risk to children. These powers were enacted in a manner which gave child protection professionals a new autonomy to act in discretionary ways in protecting children.