Deconstructing Child Protection: Some Methodological Choices

Abstract

All of the research associated with the orthodox approach to child abuse can be loosely framed as positivist. It assumes the respectable cloak of scientific inquiry and we refer to it as orthodox because, by and large, it contributes to the authoritative version of child abuse and it has largely gone unchallenged (Hughes, 1990).¹ As we argued in Chapter 3, it has been perpetuated by the adoption of certain accepted methods of scientific inquiry, largely drawn from a positivist position, and including most of the qualitative research, which frame the social problem of child harm and injury as something which can be remedially resolved and thus open to this line of inquiry. It is not by accident that the beginnings of the current phase can be attributed to the discovery made by paediatric radiologists in the late 1950s of the ‘battered baby syndrome’ (Parton, 1985; Pfohl, 1977). Prior to this ‘discovery’, child harm and injury was something responded to by child welfare agencies, the law, the police and the public (Parton, 1985; Corby, 1993). Significantly, it was not responded to by a research community.