Victims or threats? children in care proceedings

Community nursing and civil liberty*

“…Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, there were only three areas where one could discem any sort of organized social policy for the protection of children's interests; wardship, the Poor Law and the criminal justice system (Eekelaar et al 1982). Wardship was a legal survival from medieval times, which only affected children from relatively well-off families and was mostly concemed with the protection of their property interests.…”

Who are these Youths? Language in the Service of Policy

“…The 'child as threat', though not the dominant image of the child influencing Parliamentary law-making for most of the last two centuries (Piper, 1999a), has been an ever present motivation for charitable and state intervention in the family (Eekelaar et al, 1982;Hendrick, 1994;Morris and Giller,1987) and also specifically in relation to youth work (Stenson and Factor, 1995). The Education Act 1944, as amended by section 120 of the Education Reform Act 1988 (see Paraskeva,1992), established the British Youth Service by placing a duty on local authorities to secure the provision of social, physical and recreational training for young people through a variety of often uncoordinated providers in the voluntary and public sectors.…”

Adoption Support and the Negotiation of Ambivalence in Family Policy and Children's Services

“…Child and family policy historically has been arguably more concerned with the threat posed to the social order by young people, by what is now called`anti-social behaviour', 57 than it has with the risks they face as potential victims of harm. 58 Under New Labour governments, from the outset, parental responsibility for the anti-social behaviour of their children came under the spotlight. For example, courts were given powers to make à parenting order' 59 compelling attendance by parents at parenting classes where a child was given an anti-social behaviour order.…”