Child Sexual Abuse and the Reflexive Project of the Self: Child Protection, Individualization and Life Politics

Abstract

This chapter shifts the analysis from organizational life to focus in more detail on the kinds of relationships and work that goes on in late-modern child protection as administrative powers are turned into practices — on what has become of the aesthetic and expressive dimensions of child protection. Scholars have tended to characterize the nature of child protection and risk in one-dimensional ways: as about blame and regulation, hierarchical power and social control (Garret, 2003; Scourfield and Welsh, 2003). The wider aspects of children’s and carer’s needs are said not to form part of the assessments of the increasingly bureaucratic child protection systems (Parton et al., 1997). While I have shown that this is a legitimate concern, it is not the full story. Not all professionals and users of services accept the official (instrumentally rational) version of ‘cases’ and struggle to create meaningful pieces of work. This shows how in the bureaucratic late-modernism of child protection the law, procedures and managerial guidance can provide the context and framework out of which professionals work creatively with and within structures to carve out actions which make a (positive) difference to service user’s lives. Central to this is how the aesthetic sensibility in social work and child protection — its essential creativity — has developed to contain a significant emancipatory dimension which promotes democratic relations within families.