Safeguarding Children and Young People

A Guide for Professionals Working Together

Nick Frost

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781529737349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Safeguarding Children and Young People offers students and practitioners an accessible and multi-disciplinaryguide to working together with other professionals to deliver a child-centred and co-ordinated approach to safeguarding, in line with the Working Together to Safeguard Children guidance. Taking a 'whole systems' approach, and offering support on prevention, assessment, intervention, systems, and leadership, the book reflects on recent challenges including contextual abuse, child sexual exploitation and cyber-abuse. The book includes case studies, activities and points for reflection to aid learning and test understanding.

1 A brief history of child protection

Contents

• Introduction 8
• Understanding the history of childhood 8
• Creating modern safeguarding practice: the Victorian era 9
• The emergence of a child protection system 10
• Post-Second World War developments 14
• Conclusion 17
• Recommended reading 17

This chapter aims to:

• Argue that child abuse and child protection practices are socially constructed
• Explore the tensions between ‘care’ and ‘control’
• Propose that our understanding of contemporary practices can be improved by an understanding of social history
• Explore the roots of current child protection forms of practice

Introduction

One of the key premises of this book is that our understanding of, and response to, child abuse is ‘socially constructed’: that is that these understandings and practices change across time and place in a complex relationship with the wider social and political context. This is not simply a theoretical or academic point – understanding social construction has a direct impact on our practice. For example, although causation is complex, it is undoubtedly the case that the number of children subject to care proceedings and subsequently in the care system in England, increased after the publicity following the death of ‘Baby Peter’ (Jones, 2014). Arguably then, there is somewhere a mechanism whereby practitioners, their managers and, subsequently, CAFCASS (the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service) and the family courts respond differently to safeguarding situations after a high level of media coverage than prior to this coverage. This provides an example of how professional responses to child protection are subject to forms of active ‘social construction’. This chapter takes a wider historical lens to examine these important processes of social change further.

Understanding the history of childhood

We cannot understand the history of child abuse without exploring the history of childhood more generally: childhood, parenting and child abuse form a complex and ever-changing Venn diagram (Wright, 2015). A long historical perspective is taken by the psycho-historian of childhood Lloyd DeMause, who argues that:

Infanticide during antiquity has usually been played down despite literally hundreds of clear references by ancient writers that it was an accepted, everyday occurrence. (1974: 25)

There can be no doubt, as DeMause argues, that child abuse has existed since the beginning of humankind: there will have been acts of neglect and cruelty towards children and young people committed in many early civilisations. For example, in a society known for its sophistication and philosophy – Ancient Greece – there is historical documentation that illustrates older males had anal sex with younger boys, whom we would now describe as ‘under age’. This was known at the time, was in the public arena and was well documented (Ungaretti, 1978). Today we would name these very same acts as ‘child sexual exploitation’ or ‘grooming’. Another example comes from the slave trade. The slave trade is often written about and portrayed in dramas and films, but is rarely seen through the lens of child abuse. There is clear evidence that children were exploited for their labour and that this included physical abuse, but there is also evidence that young women were also sexually exploited and raped by slave owners and their employees (see Warren, 2007, for example). Again, today we would argue that these children and young people were subject to organised sexual exploitation.

From these sources – and there are numerous others – it can be argued that children and young people have been significantly exploited throughout history: what has varied is the nature of this abuse as well as the social, political and legal responses to it. We move on to explore how child protection as a modern social practice changed and developed in the period from 1850 onwards.

Creating modern safeguarding practice: the Victorian era

It is in the Victorian era, in Great Britain and the United States, that (during the latter half of the nineteenth century) we can find the roots of contemporary child protection practice. During this period, we can perceive the emergence of a range of foundational child welfare practices including the home visit, the case record and the early formulations of multi-agency working, and the resultant focus on abuse within the household.

There is a considerable historical debate about childhood and when it was ‘discovered’. To say childhood was ‘discovered’ at first seems counter-intuitive: surely babies and children have existed throughout the history of humanity? Of course, biological children have always existed but ‘childhood’ is a social concept, referring to a protected social space, where younger people grow, develop and are educated. The social historian Philippe Ariès (1965) argued that the first evidence of childhood in this sense emerged during the seventeenth century – he uses sources such as diaries, paintings and official records to suggest that childhood became a space for play, nurturing and education, often, but not always, accompanied by parental care and affection. This proposal that children were often maltreated is controversial amongst social historians and is disputed by many, including the eminent historical scholar Linda Pollock (1983). Pollock argues, using diaries as a major source of evidence, that parental affection has a longer, consistent (and perhaps biologically based) history.

Whatever the outcome of this intense historical debate there is no doubt that by the 1840s childhood existed as an identifiable social space, certainly amongst the upper and middle class – a gendered experience that included play, education and elements of protection (Cunningham, 2014; Wright, 2015). The space for children of the toiling classes, in agriculture or emerging industry, was different: it was often risky, harsh and very hard work. At the start of the nineteenth century, during the 1800s, there was little welfare provision for children. The Thomas Coram Foundling Hospital was formed in London in 1739 and was perhaps the first child welfare institution as such: originally designed to house abandoned babies it soon developed a wider function of raising children whose mothers could not care for them (Pugh, 2011). The Coram Hospital is exceptional and more usually child welfare was an undifferentiated part of adult provision administered through the Poor Law.

Later in the nineteenth century a comprehensive welfare system was in place – codified in the 1889 Children Act, which is sometimes known as ‘the Children’s Charter’. In 1908 incest was made illegal by the Punishment of Incest Act and a more comprehensive Children Act was passed during the same year (Stewart, 1995). Thus, we can ask what happened between 1850 and 1908 to bring about these fundamental changes in attitudes, law and practice in relation to childhood, child welfare and child abuse, which in turn led to the emergence of a child welfare system?

The emergence of a child protection system

As childhood emerged as an identifiable social space concern grew, particularly amongst the newly emergent middle classes, that the protections of middle-class childhood were not available for all children. In the rapidly growing cities the middle classes witnessed children who lived on the streets and children being subject to inadequate parenting. The middle classes perceived child abuse to be a result of parental alcohol abuse, ‘immorality’ and ‘fecklessness’. These concerns were expressed in newspaper columns and at meetings in both Great Britain and the United States of America. In New York, the roots of the Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCCs) can be found. According to some social historians (although the facts are disputed, see Watkins, 1990) in 1873 a little girl called Mary Ellen was known to be neglected and severely abused by her father. Some concerned citizens tried to protect her but found they could only do so under the then animal protection laws. This incident contributed to the formation of the New York SPCC, in 1875, a model that was then exported to England, following a visit by a banker, T.F. Agnew, which led to Liverpool founding its own SPCC in 1883 (Allen and Morton, 1961).

Underlying the growth of the SPCCs, and other philanthropic organisations, there was a genuine (often Evangelical) motive alongside a concern about preventing social disorder (Stedman Jones, 2014) that led to these developments. The US historian Linda Gordon is particularly useful in helping us reflect on these issues. In her brilliant and highly recommended study Heroes of Their Own Lives (1988) Gordon utilises original case files from the SPCC workers, in and around Boston, Massachusetts, to explore how families were worked with from the 1880s until the 1950s: her research provides valuable insights into the values and approaches adopted by this early form of child protection work. Linda Gordon argues that the SPCCs developed partially as:

helping children assumed a special resonance … because children were thought to be innocent … protecting children from the wrongs of adults unified the charitable and the controlling aspects. (1988: 29)

By 1885 the British National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) was formed and soon covered much of England. The aims of the NSPCC at this stage were as follows:

1. To prevent the public and private wrongs of children and the corruption of their morals
2. To take action for the enforcement of laws for their protection.

(Allen and Morton, 1961: 112)

The NSPCC utilised paid staff, but also volunteers, to visit families where concerns had been expressed, often by neighbours and sometimes by the family members themselves. The NSPCC operated through street work, monitoring and home visits to ensure the welfare and protection of children. These early child protection officers were often ex-armed forces males who travelled on horseback across extensive areas to visit and monitor households:

A tradition has grown up over the years for men who have retired from the Armed Services … to form a large proportion of the Inspectorate, their knowledge of their fellow men and their power being valuable qualities of their work. (Allen and Morton, 1961: 136)

Females were originally volunteers, known as Women Visitors, who assisted the male Inspectors. The written reports of the early SPCC workers reveal an authoritarian approach, backed by moral judgements and a strong determination to protect children. Gordon’s work shows that the early American SPCC records ‘called clients shiftless, coarse, low type, uncouth, immoral, feeble-mined, lazy and worthless’ (Gordon, 1988: 15). This demonstrates a social gap between workers and clients, as well as a clearly judgemental approach. It raises issues about forms of ‘care’ and ‘control’ and leads us to ask to what degree safeguarding practitioners are caring for people or are they attempting to control behaviour?

Related to this point about care and control are contemporary issues arising from our discussion of social history – that is, how safeguarding officers dealt with social differences, such as class, disability, gender and ethnicity. Gordon argues that the SPCC workers were often confronting maltreatment of women and children by men: men who often abused alcohol. The SPCCs undertook this task by ‘society workers … [spending] most of their time on the streets and calling upon families in their homes’ (Gordon, 1988: 48). As we have already discussed, the Inspectors in this early period of the SPCCs ‘were almost always male, while the clients were virtually all female’ (Gordon, 1988: 14). Gordon further argues – contrary to the argument of those who see social work as a form of social control (see Garrett, 2010, for example) – that the workers tried to transfer power within the household towards women and children: she emphasises ‘the active role of agency’ (1988: 296) of the women and children, a theme we elaborate upon in Chapter 8. Gordon outlines family scenarios that (apart from the period detail) would be familiar to any contemporary front-line worker:

Windows dirty, curtains dirty, floor and everything else in the room dirty … a fountain syringe was hanging on the wall and a vessel which was in an unsanitary condition was sitting on the floor. (Gordon, 1988: 88)

Interestingly, given some of the debates underpinning this book, we can describe their primary approach as being based in ‘family support’, by which we mean the preference was for children to remain at home with their parents as opposed to some form of alternative care. Unlike other charities established around the same time (National Children’s Homes and Dr Barnardo’s) the NSPCC did not build extensive institutions for the care of children. For a short period (1891–1903) they did have some ‘children’s shelters’ and the NSPCC did, indeed, take parents to court – but by preference they used what one prominent supporter called ‘kindly remonstrance’ and argued that ‘prevention is better than punishment’ (Hesba Stretton, quoted in Frost and Stein, 1989: 45) to try to reform errant parents. The issue of ‘family support’, as against ‘child protection’, can be seen to underpin the history of child welfare, and will be referred to throughout this book.

What is of particular interest to us in this context is how Linda Gordon reflects on the interface between the SPCC staff and the families they worked with in terms of social class and ethnicity. The context for the early part of the study is the USA of the nineteenth century, which was an emerging industrial society based on the labour of migrant families drawn from across Europe and former slaves. In this context Gordon argues that the SPCC embodied White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) values: values that included hard work, cleanliness, sexual morality and sobriety. Using her meticulous study of the case records Gordon argues that the SPCC staff worked hard to get client families to aspire to these WASP values: the Inspectors assessed the cleanliness of houses, encouraged a household model where the male was the breadwinner and the woman the home maker, and discouraged domestic violence and alcohol consumption. This was a WASP model – but one which also empowered and protected women and children. Gordon’s arguments are highly relevant to modern debates about anti-discriminatory practice and equalities in safeguarding practice.

In England Harry Ferguson has used a similar methodology to that adopted by Linda Gordon to explore child abuse and protection. His theorisation is consistent with that of Gordon but Ferguson develops a stronger focus on child protection work as a form of modern social change, expressed through the growth of bureaucratic forms of organisation and mobility. He also notes the interface with childhood distress as f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Table List
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A brief history of child protection
• 2 ‘Working together’ to safeguard children and young people
• 3 Understanding child abuse and child protection
• 4 Exploring two case studies: abuse by celebrities and abuse in institutions
• 5 Assessing need and providing early help
• 6 Working with families: child abuse within the family
• 7 Understanding child sexual exploitation
• 8 Contextual safeguarding: a contemporary challenge
• 9 Essential safeguarding skills
• 10 Conclusion and learning for the future
• Glossary
• Useful websites
• References
• Index