the UK2 system as an exemplar, we consider the history of attempts to improve the way families look after children. We trace the current child protection system and its twists and turns. As we have argued in the Introduction, more and more of the sorrows of life are being defined as the proper business of a child welfare system predicated on surveillance. While the state and its resources allegedly shrink, its gaze is harder and its tongue sharper. As part of an increasingly residual role, the system has become narrowly focused on an atomised child, severed
The state is increasingly experienced as both intrusive and neglectful, particularly by those living in poverty, leading to loss of trust and widespread feelings of alienation and disconnection.
Against this tense background, this innovative book argues that child protection policies and practices have become part of the problem, rather than ensuring children’s well-being and safety.
Building on the ideas in the best-selling Re-imagining child protection and drawing together a wide range of social theorists and disciplines, the book:
• Challenges existing notions of child protection, revealing their limits;
• Ensures that the harms children and families experience are explored in a way that acknowledges the social and economic contexts in which they live;
• Explains how the protective capacities within families and communities can be mobilised and practices of co-production adopted;
• Places ethics and human rights at the centre of everyday conversations and practices.
This book asks how far and in what way social inclusion policies are meeting the needs and rights of children and young people. Leading authors write from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines including social policy, education, geography and sociology. The book critically examines the concepts of participation and social inclusion and their links with children and childhoods and considers the geography of social inclusion and exclusion. It explores young people’s own conceptualisations of social inclusion and exclusion; and examines how these concepts have been expressed in policy at various levels.
The book concludes with an agenda for progressing participation and social inclusion, both for and with children and young people.
“Children, young people and social inclusion” will be of interest to academics, students and policy makers, as well as to a wide range of practitioners including teachers, youth workers, participation workers and those working in interagency settings.
the shaping of conduct in the hope of producing certain desired effects’ (p 52), which act on children, or rather on parts of the atomised child, to produce specific, predetermined and adult-defined outcomes. They embody beliefs and assumptions of modernity, in particular the possibility and desirability of an ordered and mastered world that is certain, controllable and predictable. Public provisions as children’s services assume particular social constructions of the child. The child of children’s services is incomplete and immature, a becoming adult who will
