Lorraine Waterhouse

Social work with children and families

Social work with children and families raises public and professional concern. Inquiries into the fatal non-accidental injury and sexual abuse of children highlight the need for sound child-care decisionmaking and effective interagency and interdisciplinary collaboration, and for the child’s best interests to have paramountcy at all times. From the mid-1970s in the UK, public accountability demanded and influenced the shape of social work services with children and their families, giving rise to an emphasis on investigation and surveillance mediated through detailed procedural guidance in local authorities and some voluntary agencies. Since 1990, major changes in child and family law have been enacted throughout the UK, leading to a greater emphasis on parental responsibility and ascertaining children’s views.

Care and protection in Scottish child welfare: evidence of double jeopardy?

Since the inception of the Scottish childrens hearings system, an increasing concentration of child care and protection referrals has emerged. Data on 225 children referred on care and protection grounds are examined. Children faced a double jeopardy of personal adversity against a background of social and economic disadvantage. A smaller group of children were also victims of an offence by an adult. A significant proportion of children had multiple referrals suggesting a recycling of some children. Social adversity in the backgrounds of children has been found in other child welfare studies. The significance accorded to this by social work agencies and the links between neglect and poverty may be overlooked. The importance of policy that provides comprehensive public assistance and services, as found in other European countries, is an inescapable conclusion.

Children's hearings in Scotland: compulsion and disadvantage

This paper outlines some key findings from a study of 1,155 children referred in 1995 to the childrens hearings system in Scotland. The majority of children formally processed in the system were found to come from less well off families, often facing multiple adversities. Children subject to compulsory measures of supervision were especially likely to have backgrounds characterized by factors associated with social disadvantage. The national picture suggests an overall increase in the number of children subject to compulsory measures of supervision over the last ten years. Independent evidence highlights a potential use of compulsion as a means to access scarce resources. When taken together, these three separate findings raise fundamental questions about the role of compulsory measures in the operation of the system. It is argued that using compulsion for resource acquisition would offend against the principle of minimum intervention, ultimately transgressing childrens rights. Compulsion as a gatekeeping mechanism may allow, in effect, for the targeting of scare resources to those children perceived to be most in need; but this may be at the cost of increasing state intervention in the lives of some families and decreasing access to resources for others.

Comparative juvenile justice policy: The alliance between Scotland and the State of Massachusetts revisited

Abstract This paper examines policy and practice developments in juvenile justice in Europe and the USA. Many jurisdictions have become increasingly concerned with the control of youth crime reflecting a shift in emphasis from welfare to justice approaches. Adult models of justice have come to the fore in the treatment of juveniles in a range of jurisdictions, separating them from children in need of care and protection. Scotland and the State of Massachusetts share a common history of research interests and approaches to dealing with juvenile offenders. The way these jurisdictions have adapted to the demand for public protection in the past decade is explored. It is argued that Scotland has retained a clear welfare focus whilst developments in Massachusetts are more varied. Massachusetts can be seen to offer the appearance of greater public protection by increasing the emphasis on punishment within a system that still deals with the majority of juveniles separately.

Justice and welfare : has the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 shifted the balance ?

Abstract The Children (Scotland) Act 1995 introduces important changes that may in the long term undermine the principles of early intervention, partnership and child welfare embodied in the Children‘s Hearings System. The Act can also be seen to represent a shift towards a more justice-oriented approach to child-care decision-making. Paradoxically whilst child-care policy is moving towards a renewed interest in prevention, family support and partnership, already central concerns in the Children’s Hearings System, the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 may in practice operate to endanger these strengths.

Book Reviews : Hewstone, Miles and Rupert Brown (eds) (1986) Contact and Conflict in Intergroup Encounters. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 231 pp

This book is well worth reading. Its focus is an examination of the hypothesis, first developed by Allport in the mid-1950s, that contact between individuals from distinct and opposing groups will improve group relations. Hewstone and Brown approach analysis of this disarmmgly simple hypothesis in two ways: first, they critically review its development; and second, and innovatively, they present a collection of international case studies which serve to illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of the hypothesis when applied to a range of issues including race and industrial relations. As social psychologists, Hewstone and Brown seek to identify both the individual and social processes associated with the reduction of conflict, and to include historical, political and economic information for each country. Individual contributors from different national backgrounds discuss the sigmficance of contact in resolving deeply rooted conflicts and conclude a cautious optimism for the idea. The editors advance a new model, albeit untested, which distinguishes between perceptions of contact as either interpersonal, i.e. exchanges between individuals ignoring the group to which they belong, or as intergroup, i.e. exchanges between individuals as group representatives. The former, it is argued, is suf‘’~ient to change personal relations between individuals from different groups, but the latter is necessary if these improved relations are to be generalized to the wider group. Whether the