Child Physical Abuse and the Return of Death Since the 1970s: Child Protection, Risk and Reflexive Modernization

Abstract

While I shall now begin to show that significant changes have occurred in child protection since the 1970s, I am also arguing that the core theoretical arguments already made in this book stand the test of (late-modern) time. I have characterized child protection as a form of bureaucratic modernism in terms of how it is constituted through administrative powers deriving from the law and agency procedures, which are enacted through movement in time and space, most significantly in terms of encounters with client’s homes and lives, which gives to it its ephemeral, fleeting, contingent nature. Linked to this is the centrality of fateful moments in the unfolding contingency of child protection as a practical experience. Thus the form that child protection takes today remains broadly the same as when constituted early in the twentieth century, in the sense of the aesthetics of its modernist routines and everyday practices: referral taking, investigation, home-visiting. The experience of modernity in child protection, meanwhile, continues to be one of deep engagement with psychodynamic and symbolic processes filtered through the human body, senses, the inner-life and the emotions.