Protecting Children in Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity

276 Pages·2004·0.8 MB·English

by  Harry Ferguson (auth.)

Protecting Children
in Time
Child Abuse, Child Protection and the
Consequences of Modernity
Harry Ferguson
Protecting Children in Time
Protecting Children
in Time
Child Abuse, Child Protection and the
Consequences of Modernity
Harry Ferguson
© Harry Ferguson 2004
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004
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ISBN 978-1-4039-0693-9 ISBN 978-0-230-00624-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-0-230-00624-9
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ferguson,Harry (Thomas Harold)
Protecting children in time :child abuse,child protection and the
consequences of modernity / Harry Ferguson.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1–4039–0692–0 – ISBN 978-1–4039–0693–9 (pbk.)
1.Child abuse.2.Child abuse – Prevention.3.Social change.I.Title.
HV6626.5.F47 2004
362.76(cid:2)7—dc22 2004045425
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
To Claire and our children, Ellen, Katie,
Ben and Susie
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of
all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish
the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen rela-
tions…all swept away, all new ones become antiquated before they can
ossify. All that is solid melts into air…
(Marx and Engels, 1888, pp. 53–4)
We always worked at a fairly cracking pace in north Tottenham.
(a London social worker in her evidence to the public
inquiry into the death from child abuse of Victoria
Climbié, cited in Laming, 2003, p. 184)
It seems to me that I would always be better off where I am not, and this
question of moving is one of those I discuss incessantly with my soul.
(Charles Baudelaire, cited in Urry, 2000, p. i)
I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something
other than sit on its ass in a museum. I am for an art that embroils itself
with the everyday crap and comes out on top. I am for an art that tells
you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art
that helps old ladies across the street.
(Claes Oldenburg, cited in Berman, 1983, p. 320)
The knowledge of horrible events periodically intrudes into public
awareness but is rarely retained for long. Denial, repression, and dissoci-
ation operate on a social as well as an individual level. The study of psy-
chological trauma has an ‘underground’ history. Like traumatized
people we have been cut off from knowledge of our past. Like trauma-
tized people we need to understand the past in order to reclaim the pres-
ent and the future. Therefore, an understanding of psychological trauma
begins with rediscovering history.
(Judith Herman, 1992, p. 2)
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements x
1 Protecting Children in Time, or Failing To: Child
Abuse, Child Protection and Modernity 1
Life and death politics: the contemporary state of
child protection 5
Researching child protection, past and present 10
Theorizing child protection and modernity: ‘solid’
and ‘melting’ visions 13
2 Taking it Onto the Streets: The Discovery
of Child Death and Birth of Child Protection,
1870–1914 23
Child protection in pre-modern times 24
Taking it onto the streets: child protection’s
modern roots 26
Protecting children in late-nineteenth-century and
early-twentieth-century times 36
Changing strategies of practice: bringing child protection
into the home 43
Prompt local action: the protection of children in
new times 47
3 The Smell of Practice: Child Protection, the Body
and the Experience of Modernity 52
Child protection, mobility and the culture of modernism 53
Child protection as the fleeting, the ephemeral and
the contingent 58
The smell of practice: child protection as embodied
action 62
The body and the new order of child protection 70
The tragedy of modernity: the failure to protect
sexually abused children in time 72
vii
viii Contents
4 From Day-to-Day Quietly and Without Fuss:
Child Protection, Simple Modernity and the
Repression of Knowledge of Child Death, 1914–70 80
The sequestration of child death and protection 81
Child protection and fateful moments 90
Child protection, trust and ontological security 92
Disgust, the grotesque body and exclusionary
dynamic of child protection 94
Child protection and the legacy of simple modernity 102
5 Child Physical Abuse and the Return of
Death Since the 1970s: Child Protection, Risk
and Reflexive Modernization 106
The ‘(re-)discovery’ of child abuse 108
From risk consciousness to risk anxiety: child
protection in the risk society 115
The roots of anxiety: blaming systems and fear
of children’s suffering 120
Protecting children in late-modern times 123
Body projects: living as well as working with
child protection and risk 127
Sequestration and death in late-modern child protection 129
Containing risk anxiety: rethinking bureaucracy in
late-modern child protection 133
6 Child Sexual Abuse and the Reflexive Project
of the Self: Child Protection, Individualization
and Life Politics 136
Child protection, individualization and the
reflexive citizen 137
Help-seeking, creative, reflexive agency and the
complexities of child protection 140
Child protection interventions and life-planning 149
Men, individualization and child protection 154
Individualization becomes public: child protection and
intimate citizenship 156
The ambiguous politics of child abuse and barriers
to effective child protection 157
Contents ix
7 Into Another World: Child Neglect,
Multi-problem Families and the Psychosocial
Dynamics of Late-modern Child Protection 163
Violence and resistance in child protection work 164
The complexities of human agency and the psychodynamics
of child protection 167
‘That sort of neglect smell’: the symbolic dimensions
of child protection 175
The ‘time warp’ and other-worldliness of protecting
children in (other’s) space 186
8 Liquid Welfare: Child Protection and the
Consequences of Modernity 192
Modernity under a positive sign: the creative
achievements of child protection 193
Time, space and the mobilities of child protection 195
Failures to protect in time revisited: the tragedy of
Victoria Climbié 205
Liquid practices: towards a critical theory of child
protection without guarantees 212
Appendix 1 221
Appendix 2 222
Notes 223
Bibliography 225
Index 240
Preface and Acknowledgements
For most of my working life – 25 years of it to be precise – I have been
involved in doing but mostly studying forms of social intervention,
especially child protection. In 1978 I left Ireland to become a social
worker (then called ‘Inspector’) with the National Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in London. Like most social
workers I witnessed first hand some horrendous cases of child abuse and
neglect. Just a few that come to mind include: the terribly neglected
three-year-old boy with a frost bitten penis caused by the bed he had wet
freezing as he was locked for hours in a bedroom without heating; the
two-year-old who was literally skin and bone and had eaten the plastic
teat of the feeding bottle having been locked in a room and ignored for
a week by his ‘carer’, his mother’s boyfriend and pimp; the countless
children with suspected non-accidental injuries, like the
six-week-old baby with bruising to her face perpetrated it was suspected
by her father; or the 15-year-old girl who had been so badly beaten by
her mother that she needed hospital treatment, whose father was sexu-
ally abusing her, and who was removed into care never to return home.
Then there were the countless less dramatic cases of mild neglect and
low level risk to children living with vulnerable mothers and fathers
struggling to care well enough.
Like the vast bulk of child protection, this kind of solid work went
largely unrecognized beyond the confidential routines of the profes-
sional system. My research into child protection practice in the present
has convinced me that this remains no less true today than it was in the
1980s. I have long believed that the routine achievements of social
workers and other professionals involved in child protection have gone
unheralded and that the sheer complexities of child protection work are
deeply misunderstood, a situation that has been made much worse by
the regular and often vicious public criticism of professionals for ‘failing’
to protect children. This book is, among other things, an attempt to put
that right. Yet it is far from being some kind of unqualified celebration
of heroic child protection. It is rather an attempt to critically analyse the
meanings of child protection in modern societies, the forms it takes as a
modern experience; its routines, creative possibilities and limitations.
On the basis of my practical experience I became deeply curious about
why child protection took the forms that it did: where, for instance,
x