Introduction

This chapter and Chapter Ten focus on practice issues, drawing from a range of research and evaluation projects that the author has been involved in over the last decade. This chapter concentrates on a piece of research in a neglected and difficult area, that where families come to the attention of services because of concerns about violence and neglect. While the findings confirm some well-known issues, some, hitherto unidentified, tensions and dilemmas are explored.

Setting the scene

Service development and underpinning philosophies differ from country to country, reflecting views about the appropriate roles and responsibilities of parents, employers and the state in relation to children and childcare. A very brief outline of the policy context for the research focused on here is offered particularly for readers not familiar with the English context (see Parton, 1985, 1990, 2006).

For much of the 20th century, based on developments in the last quarter of the 19th century, the role of the state was essentially to support the family in the upbringing of children. When the state did intervene, it did so because families were perceived to be failing. As outlined in previous chapters, the post-war welfare state was based on a particular model of the family – the male breadwinner model (see Featherstone, 2004):

Childcare officers, as they were known post-World War Two, were informed by the then influential theories of material deprivation, based on the work of Bowlby, as outlined in Chapter Five. There was a belief that the major social ills of poverty could be solved by the project of social democracy. Thus, if families continued to experience difficulties, this was due to factors such as the early childhood experiences of the parents. Women were the major recipients of services, with an acceptance of the gendered division of labour in the home. While workers were often pragmatic in their approach, the underlying theoretical premises were based on a form of psychodynamic thinking or attachment theory.