Liquid Welfare: Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity

Abstract

The consequences of modernity for child protection that I have traced in this book can be understood on a number of levels. Child protection, I have shown, is constituted by tangled networks of laws, procedures, offices, roads, cars, dwellings, children, adults, bodies, emotions and actions. My aim has been to try and do justice to the range of these networks, their complexity and effects. In particular I have sought to rethink child protection in terms of social theories of modernity, risk society, movement and the emerging sociology of mobilities, at the heart of which is the embodied social actor; the living, breathing, thinking, feeling professional going about their lives and everyday work.