Abstract
This article explores the experiences of families within the Troubled Families Programme in responding to professional concerns about the condition and maintenance of the family home. Drawing upon care ethicists’ development of relational autonomy perspectives, neoliberal assumptions about personal agency and responsibility are challenged, and the complexity of the constraints upon families highlighted. Within this framework, family interventions can be repositioned, not as an intrusive form of domestic surveillance levied at working class women, but as an opportunity to support families (and especially mothers) to overcome oppressive conditions which constrain their capacity to act.
Highlights
The Troubled Families Programme (TFP) has seen the national expansion of family intervention services which deploy a named key worker to work intensively with families facing multiple disadvantage
This article draws upon recent debates about the ways in which the key worker is implicated in the surveillance of the family in respect of property maintenance, domestic chores and cleanliness (e.g. Flint, 2012 and Crossley, 2015a)
The TFP has been characterised by a responsibilisation agenda which seeks to activate the ‘troubled’ family, with the mother at its core, in achieving more socially acceptable lifestyles
Summary
This article explores the experiences of families within the Troubled Families Programme in responding to professional concerns about the condition and maintenance of the family home. Drawing upon care ethicists’ development of relational autonomy perspectives, neoliberal assumptions about personal agency and responsibility are challenged, and the complexity of the constraints upon families highlighted. Within this framework, family interventions can be repositioned, not as an intrusive form of domestic surveillance levied at working class women, but as an opportunity to support families (and especially mothers) to overcome oppressive conditions which constrain their capacity to act
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