Joanne Warner

Social work, class politics and risk in the moral panic over Baby P

The hostile reaction to social workers following the conviction of the killers of Baby P in November 2008 was unprecedented even by the standards of previous high-profile child abuse deaths, such as Maria Colwell and Victoria Climbié. Media coverage, particularly in the press, was extensive. Reaction to the case has precipitated major reforms across social work at all levels. In this article, I argue that these events need to be understood through critical analysis of the political, ideological and symbolic dimensions of the reaction to Baby Ps death. I show that recent developments in critical moral panic theory are useful in providing the basis for such an analysis – particularly the idea of moral panic as ‘an extreme risk discourse’ linked to processes of moral regulation, and as an extreme form of othering. I draw on research involving the qualitative document analysis of press reports about Baby P that were published during the first week of media coverage in November 2008, following the criminal conviction of his killers and the lifting of reporting restrictions. I show how the reaction to the brutality of Baby Ps death also reflected deep anxieties about ‘new’ class formations in contemporary Britain, specifically the behaviours of an imagined dangerous, contaminating underclass, and involved the assertion of middle-class identities. In its complex and contradictory constructions of social workers in the case as ‘folk devils’, the moral panic over Baby P revisits profound, unresolved moral disturbance about social works necessary propinquity to the underclass and its capacity for moral regulation and social control.

Smoking, Stigma and Human Rights in Mental Health: Going up in Smoke?

Debates about the ban on smoking in public places have centred on the right to self-determination and privacy versus the right to health. This paper addresses the issue of smoking in relation to mental health and focuses on the right to dignity and respect. The public health agenda on smoking has involved the mobilisation of stigma to persuade people to give up. The paper argues that this strategy risks adding to the stigma and process of ‘othering’ that many mental health service users already experience and is also likely to be ineffective in reducing smoking rates, particularly among heavy smokers.

The cafe as affective community space: Reconceptualizing care and emotional labour in everyday life

The importance of cafes in fulfilling certain political, cultural and social functions has long been acknowledged in the social sciences. Despite this interest, there has been relatively little empirical or theoretical work which explores the intersection between the idea of the cafe and the concept of care as understood in social policy and practice. In particular, there has been little work that considers the social value of sites such as cafes, especially in deprived areas, and the role they may play in the day-to-day lives of people who use them. Through a detailed case study of a cafe, we examine the meaning of community, family and home in terms of the affective connections that places like cafes entail. We argue that powerful forms of everyday care work may be found in such sites, and we advocate for greater awareness in social policy of the complex and multilayered nature of emotional labour in this context.

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.

Beyond the Risk Paradigm in Mental Health Policy and Practice

Modern society is increasingly preoccupied with fears for the future and the idea of preventing ‘the worst’. The result is a focus on attempting to calculate the probabilities of adverse events occurring – in other words, on measuring risk. Since the 1990s, the idea of risk has come to dominate policy and practice in mental health across the USA, Australasia and Europe.In this timely new text, a group of international experts examines the ways in which the narrow focus on specific kinds of risk, such as violence towards others, perpetuates the social disadvantages experienced by mental health service users whilst, at the same time, ignoring the vast array of risks experienced by the service users themselves. Benefitting from the authors’ extensive practice experience, the book considers how the dominance of the risk paradigm generates dilemmas for mental health organizations, as well as within leadership and direct practice roles, and offers practical resolutions to these dilemmas that both satisfy professional ethics and improve the experience of the service user.