The Rhetorical Idiom of Unreason: On Labelling in Child Protection

Abstract

This paper analyses how social workers in the German child protection system rhetorically frame their cases, and how their rhetoric defines its categorical labels corresponding to positions of gender and generation: to what degree are mothers considered as perpetrators and children as victims? Seventy case narrations of social workers on the frontline are analysed regarding the rhetorical idioms they applied. The results show that violence is an irrelevant interpretive framework for the social problems at work in child protection. Instead, irresponsible mothers and their limited agencies are staged front and centre. Categories of limited agency serve as rhetorical devices for the social workers to justify diverse decisions ranging from implementing interventions to terminating the professional-client relationship due to the labelling of the mother as mentally ill. As the rhetorical idiom of unreason does not operate with categories of perpetration and victimization, equivalences for the labels of the practical objectives of victimization are analysed. Consequently, the responsibility of the mother is deflected as her limited agency is seen as a product of troubling conditions. In turn, children are either ignored as victims or even treated as a troubling condition for the mothers’ limited agency. This may lead to the blacking out of the adverse consequences of child abuse and neglect as well as of possible resources for the children to avoid or prevent violent situations. In this way, child protection helps the reproduction of the generational order, which is the basis for child abuse and neglect.