Brid Featherstone

Re-imagining child protection : towards humane social work with families

This book challenges contemporary directions in policy and practice with child protection. It argues for the importance of understanding the role of poverty and deprivation in the difficulties faced by families under neo-liberalism and challenges a child protection project that is focused on rescuing children and demonising their parents. It seeks to engage in dialogue and make common cause with those who are developing a relational approach to welfare and safeguarding and contribute to a growing literature that calls for a alternate paradigm to that which is currently hegemonic.

Contemporary fathering : theory, policy and practice

Introduction The contemporary context The historical context Freud and his legacy Psychological perspectives Sociological perspectives The politics of fatherhood: contemporary developments Contemporary social policies Working with fathers Reflections on a decade of working with fathers Concluding remarks.

Why gender matters in child welfare and protection

This article argues that the lack of a gender analysis in New Labour policy in relation to child welfare and protection has led to problematic gaps at the level of policy and service provision. It explores why the widespread mobilization of terms such as ‘parent’ and ‘child’ obscures important and persistent issues in relation to gender equity in care-giving, sexual violence and help-seeking. Whilst there is some attention being paid to the needs of fathers, including the need to involve them in service provision, this attention is tokenistic and inadequately grounded in practice realities. The valorization of the ‘new’, particularly in the context of a New Labour project grounded in using language in a very considered way, offers opportunities to consider the ‘power of language’ at the same time as it obscures the ‘language of power’. Gender is a particular casualty in such a climate.

Investing in children, regulating parents, thinking family: a decade of tensions and contradictions

This article describes the contested and underdeveloped backdrop to ‘“whole family” approaches’, whereby families with care and protection needs are caught in a conflicting set of policy and practice expectations concerning responsibility to care whilst being positioned as families that fail. Questions are raised about how supported families are to navigate their way through these permissive and punitive policies and practices. We suggest that there is an urgent need for more ‘bottom–up’ research informed by the ethic of care to develop the kinds of policies and practices that might make it more possible for them to do so.

Oh no ! Not more isms : feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism and social work education

In this article we explore how perspectives drawn from feminism, postmodernism and poststructuralism can usefully be applied to debates in social work education. Within this framework we highlight the centrality of issues related to power, knowledge, difference and subjectivity. We do not seek to offer a new set of ‘isms’, but to suggest a range of possibilities about the ways in which knowledge is produced and used within social work.

Feminism and child abuse: opening up some possibilities?

This article explores some of the issues raised by feminists who are engaging with the debates within postmodernism and poststructural ism. It specifically examines contributions in the areas of knowledge, gender and power. It then goes on to identify key debates within the field of gender and child abuse. It argues that areas of concern, cur rently, cohere around the kinds of theory required and how power and gender should be understood. The article explores some of the possibilities for theorising raised by the perspectives. It concludes with a brief look at some possible ways forward in relation to policy.

Writing fathers in but mothers out

Since the late 1990s a series of government departments have promoted a policy and practice agenda urging practitioners in a range of settings such as school, health care and children’s centres to ‘engage’ fathers. The rationale for this project is that fostering father involvement with children will promote good outcomes particularly for those children who are most disadvantaged. The author suggests that this agenda is normatively undesirable and flawed practically. Gender equality appears to be neither an explicit nor implicit aim. Moreover, by constructing the father—child relationship as dyadic, mothers’ contributions to fathering and childcare are obscured. Drawing from a piece of qualitative research with fathers about their experiences of social care services, it would appear, however, that the fathers were preoccupied with mothers and their perceived power. Indeed, they had constructed a world of powerful unpredictable women who were supported by feminized services. Not only is writing mothers out problematic for gender equality purposes, it is also not feasible practically.

Inequalities in English child protection practice under austerity: a universal challenge?

The role that area deprivation, family poverty, and austerity policies play in the demand for and supply of childrens services has been a contested issue in England in recent years. These relationships have begun to be explored through the concept of inequalities in child welfare, in parallel to the established fields of inequalities in education and health. This article focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and out-of-home care and child protection interventions. The work scales up a pilot study in the West Midlands to an all-England sample, representative of English regions and different levels of deprivation at a local authority (LA) level. The analysis evidences a strong relationship between deprivation and intervention rates and large inequalities between ethnic categories. There is further evidence of the inverse intervention law (Bywaters et al., 2015): For any given level of neighbourhood deprivation, higher rates of child welfare interventions are found in LAs that are less deprived overall. These patterns are taking place in the context of cuts in spending on English childrens services between 2010–2011 and 2014–2015 that have been greatest in more deprived LAs. Implications for policy and practice to reduce such inequalities are suggested.

Let’s stop feeding the risk monster: towards a social model of ‘child protection’

This article explores how the child protection system currently operates in England. It analyses how policy and practice has developed, and articulates the need for an alternative approach. It draws from the social model as applied in the fields of disability and mental health, to begin to sketch out more hopeful and progressive possibilities for children, families and communities. The social model specifically draws attention to the economic, environmental and cultural barriers faced by people with differing levels of (dis)ability, but has not been used to think about ‘child protection’, an area of work in England that is dominated by a focus on risk and risk aversion. This area has paid limited attention to the barriers to ensuring children and young people are cared for safely within families and communities, and the social determinants of much of the harms they experience have not been recognised because of the focus on individualised risk factors.

Ireland's Opportunity to Learn from England's Difficulties? Auditing Uncertainty in Child Protection

The paper explores policy developments in the Republic of Ireland in relation to child protection and argues that they are in danger of replicating some of the mistakes made in England under New Labour. It is argued that a focus on standardisinf processes and procedures is misguided, diverting attention from the importance of attending to the complexities of communication sharing and decision-making in a very difficult area of work. Moreover, the issues that have emerged from abuse cases in Ireland will not be satisfactorily addressed by standardisation.