Introduction

Stories of pain, hurt, betrayal and violence are told to professionals everyday and, indeed, are heard by them often as they struggle with huge caseloads and worries of their own at home and at work. However, a key theme of this book, and central to its mission, is a concern that the language and theoretical and practice tools available to them are impoverished and increasingly inadequate. This is partly due to contemporary challenges in terms of funding of course. We have already highlighted how those services and families who need the most have had the most taken away since 2010. But it is also due to the inadequacy of a model that translates need to risk routinely, colonises a variety of sorrows and troubles within a child protection frame, and has abandoned or lost a sense of the contexts, economic and social, in which so many are living lives of quiet, or not so quiet, desperation.

This chapter brings some of these lives into sharp relief. It has two purposes in the context of this book: first to shine a light on lived realities but second to offer some really vivid examples of how we might begin the process of designing services with families rather than for them. Thus it acts as an essential bridge to the subsequent chapters where a social model is fleshed out across policy and practice contexts.

The chapter draws on a number of studies conducted by the authors, in particular a detailed study of families and their experiences of welfare services, hereafter referred to as Study One (Morris et al, 2018b) and an enquiry on the role of the social worker in adoption, ethics and human rights (Study Two), which explored the perspectives of birth families, adoptive parents and adopted young people (Featherstone et al, 2018).