Abstract
As parents, we hand on the best and worst of ourselves to our children, and much more in between. Philip Larkin's famous poem, best known for its startling opening line ‘They fuck you up, your mum ...
Highlights
As parents we hand on the best and worst of ourselves to our children, and much more in between
This crisis is just one symptom of the long, complex cultural narrative of child maltreatment and child protection work in Britain that has been profoundly shaped by recurrent episodes of moral panic and febrile media scandal mongering, usually centring on individual cases of child death
In some respects Munro’s critique of how child protection has evolved chimes well with current government ideology. She has been a trenchant critic of over-bureaucratisation, and calls for a return to front line child care practices based on professional judgement, an acceptance of occasional devastating failures to protect children, and a refusal of what she calls ‘the charm of the counter-factual’ – ‘if the only the social worker had done x y would never have happened’
Summary
As parents we hand on the best and worst of ourselves to our children, and much more in between. Few want to risk their careers against the possibility of a public lynching for failing to ask the right questions about a child who ends up on the mortuary slab a few days later This crisis is just one symptom of the long, complex cultural narrative of child maltreatment and child protection work in Britain that has been profoundly shaped by recurrent episodes of moral panic and febrile media scandal mongering, usually centring on individual cases of child death. Child protection work in Britain has regularly exploded into front-page news, and for two decades the specialised professional system has been a very fragile container for those working inside it These eruptions have had a further consequence, disclosing the deep existential and social anxieties that child protection work engages with, and protects the rest of the population from having to know too much about. These anxieties concern human sexuality in all its slippery, precarious, destructive manifestations, and death
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