This article addresses comparative research on what has come to be called, in (British) English, ‘child protection’ or, rather differently, in Finnish ‘lastensuojelu’. In developing a cross‐national research project on lastensuojelu/child protection practices in England and Finland, we found it necessary to go back a few steps, to address what might usually be considered as ‘background issues’. This article discusses the welfare state traditions in both countries, especially with respect to families and children, in order to contextualise the focus of ongoing qualitative research on micro comparisons. When comparing the mundane practices of child protection and the ways problems and clienthoods are constructed, as in this study, historical, social, cultural and linguistic issues matter. Indeed, very basic concepts such as ‘child protection’ and ‘child protection case’ become problematic in the comparison.
This paper aims to shed light on the ways in which 'neutrality' is both produced and resisted by socially competent actors in family therapy sessions. It draws upon recent and previous papers in this journal (Stancombe and White, 1997;Stratton, 2003aStratton, , 2003b, which highlight the importance of blame in therapeutic encounters. When families come to therapy, individual members frequently deliver competing accounts about the family troubles and who is to blame for them. This produces particular challenges for the therapist. We examine the practices of therapists in managing accountability in the session and in their own discussions. Family therapists operate with a professional ethic of neutrality, or multi-partiality. This paper is concerned with the linguistic strategies used by therapists to deal with overtly blaming accounts, how these strategies are responded to by family members in talk-in-interaction and how therapists go about crafting accountability-neutral versions. We show that the social and moral context of family work makes the therapist's job of communicating multi-partiality precarious. In producing accountability-neutral versions of families' troubles, therapists are forced to make practical-moral evaluations of competing versions of events. We conclude by arguing for a more explicit engagement with the moral nature of therapeutic practice.
The article reviews the relevance and methodological utility of welfare regime typologies for the study of professional sense-making in social work with families. Focus groups were carried out with social workers in European and Latin American countries representing four different policy regimes. A case vignette was used to elicit social workers’ descriptions of how welfare policy may influence how they understand their work task and the notion of family. The research team identified methodological challenges of general relevance in similar policy-practice studies. There were paradoxes in terms of homogeneity on the regime level vs. heterogeneity within and between national services. Pitfalls appeared in the selection of regime-typical cases, language/cultural barriers, and in deciding organisational level. The article shows that welfare typologies have potentialities in that they may provide a helpful analytical basis for theoretical and practical reasoning in which syntheses between policy and practice can be explored, discussed and challenged.
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