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This chapter draws together themes emerging from the preceding chapters, as well as identifying policy recommendations. It starts by highlighting the insights drawn from the cross-disciplinary approach adopted in the book. It then moves on to stress the social justice and human rights perspective, including the implications of how unaccompanied asylum-seeking children are framed by the authorities that are dealing with their cases. It discusses the need to acknowledge and support young people in exercising their agency, albeit within the confines of structural inequalities. The chapter then provides policy recommendations including the implementation of current laws and guidelines, and a review of age assessment processes. The chapter concludes with examples of new practices and new critical thinking that have emerged in the face of challenges associated with supporting unaccompanied young migrants in recent years.
Taking a multi-disciplinary perspective, and one grounded in human rights, this book explores in depth the journeys unaccompanied child migrants take through the UK legal and care systems. Arriving with little agency, the book considers what becomes of these children as they grow and assume new roles and identities, only to risk losing legal protection as they reach eighteen. Through international studies, and crucially of the young migrants themselves, the book examines the narratives they present, and the frameworks of culture and legislation into which they are placed. Challenging existing policy, it questions, from a social justice perspective, what the treatment of this group tells us about our systems and the cultural presuppositions on which they depend. Contributors are researchers and practitioners in film-making, human geography, law, psychology, psychotherapy, social work and sociology,
Taking a multi-disciplinary perspective, and one grounded in human rights, this book explores in depth the journeys unaccompanied child migrants take through the UK legal and care systems. Arriving with little agency, the book considers what becomes of these children as they grow and assume new roles and identities, only to risk losing legal protection as they reach eighteen. Through international studies, and crucially of the young migrants themselves, the book examines the narratives they present, and the frameworks of culture and legislation into which they are placed. Challenging existing policy, it questions, from a social justice perspective, what the treatment of this group tells us about our systems and the cultural presuppositions on which they depend. Contributors are researchers and practitioners in film-making, human geography, law, psychology, psychotherapy, social work and sociology,
Taking a multi-disciplinary perspective, and one grounded in human rights, this book explores in depth the journeys unaccompanied child migrants take through the UK legal and care systems. Arriving with little agency, the book considers what becomes of these children as they grow and assume new roles and identities, only to risk losing legal protection as they reach eighteen. Through international studies, and crucially of the young migrants themselves, the book examines the narratives they present, and the frameworks of culture and legislation into which they are placed. Challenging existing policy, it questions, from a social justice perspective, what the treatment of this group tells us about our systems and the cultural presuppositions on which they depend. Contributors are researchers and practitioners in film-making, human geography, law, psychology, psychotherapy, social work and sociology,
This chapter provides an overview of the issues faced by unaccompanied child migrants in their search for safety and security. It highlights legal definitions used in national and international law, and the rights that such young people can claim under those laws. It outlines the demography of flows of migrant youth, including numbers, nationalities, and gender. The diversity of the group is highlighted, along with the way in which their treatment and experiences vary significantly depending on how they are framed by the immigration and welfare authorities that they come into contact with. The chapter examines the role of a social justice framework in understanding migrant experiences, an acknowledgement of young people’s agency, and the role of social workers and others working with young people. The chapter finishes with an overview of the subsequent chapters divided into three main sections: framing the youth migrant debate, exploring migrant youth identities, and international perspectives.
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.
This introductory chapter provides a background of child protection and its intersection with wider social policies and social trends. The modern child protection system emerged in the 1960s, rooted in a concern to stop babies dying or being ‘battered’ by parents who were considered to be suffering from a lack of empathic mothering in their own lives. Poverty, bad housing, and other social factors were screened out as holding helpful explanatory value in relation to why some babies were seriously harmed by their carers. From those beginnings, rooted in care for babies who were powerless and voiceless, and compassion for emotionally deprived parents, the system has expanded enormously in terms of remit, research base, influence, and power within a complex and changing society. The chapter then considers the core aspects and assumptions behind the welfare state and the emergence of a discourse around individual responsibility and risk that encompasses cause, consequence, and attribution.
This chapter traces the history of attempts to improve the way families look after children using the UK system as an exemplar. As part of an increasingly residual role, the child protection system has become narrowly focused on an atomised child, severed from family, relationships, and social circumstances: a precarious object of ‘prevention’, or rescue. As its categories and definitions have gradually grown, the gap between child protection services and family support has widened. This has a number of antecedents. First, with the exception of a few decades of the 20th century, history shows a strong tendency towards individual social engineering to produce model citizens, with parenting practices the primary focus of state attention. Second, the post-war welfare consensus has withered in the face of market enchantment and a burgeoning commissioning paradigm.
This chapter discusses the residual, but strongly legitimised, role for the state in preventing damage to children, which carries high levels of criticism for those parents seen as failing to optimise their child’s developmental potential. The idea that childhood experiences are important and can be formative clearly has a common-sense truth to it and obviously, traumatic experiences in childhood will have lasting impacts. However, a vocabulary has emerged in which notions of toxic parenting and the quest for optimum developmental flourishing create new mandates for the state to act. The chapter then argues that these are necessary to explain the sharp rises in national rates of child removal, particularly the permanent removal of very small children, documented over the last decade. They also contribute to service fragmentation by privileging intervention in the early years in the form of ‘evidence-based’ parenting programmes.
This chapter explores the experiences of families enmeshed in child welfare systems. Stories of pain, hurt, betrayal, and violence are told to professionals everyday. However, a key theme of this book is a concern that the language and theoretical and practice tools available to them are impoverished and increasingly inadequate. This is partly due to the inadequacy of a model that translates need to risk routinely, colonises a variety of sorrows and troubles within a child protection frame, and has abandoned or lost a sense of the contexts — economic and social — in which so many are living lives of quiet desperation. The chapter draws on a number of studies conducted by the authors, in particular a detailed study of families and their experiences of welfare services; and an enquiry on the role of the social worker in adoption, ethics, and human rights, which looked at the perspectives of birth families, adoptive parents, and adopted young people.
