Social work, class politics and risk in the moral panic over Baby P

Abstract

The hostile reaction to social workers following the conviction of the killers of Baby P in November 2008 was unprecedented even by the standards of previous high-profile child abuse deaths, such as Maria Colwell and Victoria Climbié. Media coverage, particularly in the press, was extensive. Reaction to the case has precipitated major reforms across social work at all levels. In this article, I argue that these events need to be understood through critical analysis of the political, ideological and symbolic dimensions of the reaction to Baby P's death. I show that recent developments in critical moral panic theory are useful in providing the basis for such an analysis – particularly the idea of moral panic as ‘an extreme risk discourse’ linked to processes of moral regulation, and as an extreme form of othering. I draw on research involving the qualitative document analysis of press reports about Baby P that were published during the first week of media coverage in November 2008, following the criminal conviction of his killers and the lifting of reporting restrictions. I show how the reaction to the brutality of Baby P's death also reflected deep anxieties about ‘new’ class formations in contemporary Britain, specifically the behaviours of an imagined dangerous, contaminating underclass, and involved the assertion of middle-class identities. In its complex and contradictory constructions of social workers in the case as ‘folk devils’, the moral panic over Baby P revisits profound, unresolved moral disturbance about social work's necessary propinquity to the underclass and its capacity for moral regulation and social control.