Victim, Perpetrator, or What Else?

Generational and Gender Perspectives on Children, Youth, and Violence

Doris Bühler-Niederberger, Lars Alberth, Doris Bühler-Niederberger, Lars Alberth

• Editorial: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789733372
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Demography

Children, while being the most victimised group in society, rarely become a topic of sociological research, neither as victims nor as perpetrators. The sociological discussion on power and violence happens beyond generation as an important dimension of social structure, and in many respects also beyond gender aspects that are inseparably linked to generational violence. This is a severe omission when the extent of violence in a society needs to be understood, as well as the structures and processes perpetuating violence or opposing its abolition. It is also a serious obstacle when understanding the position of children and exploring the social meaning of childhood. This volume addresses this blind spot in sociology. It does so by mapping the ways that children and young people are considered victims or perpetrators by their societies and consequently the ways that their societies react. The chapters analyse a variety of phenomena in different countries of the Global North and South. All of these phenomena may be considered to include acts of violence toward children and adolescents, or those committed by them. Thus, violence is addressed as one of the major building blocks of the scope and qualities of children's agency, limiting the social recognition of their rights as members of their respective societies. With a global reach and cutting-edge research, this book will prove an invaluable text for researchers and leaders in the fields of comparative childhood research and sociology of violence alike.

PART I
PERCEPTIONS AND DEFINITIONS

THE RHETORICAL IDIOM OF UNREASON: ON LABELLING IN CHILD PROTECTION

Lars Alberth

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses how social workers in the German child protection system rhetorically frame their cases, and how their rhetoric defines its categorical labels corresponding to positions of gender and generation: to what degree are mothers considered as perpetrators and children as victims? Seventy case narrations of social workers on the frontline are analysed regarding the rhetorical idioms they applied. The results show that violence is an irrelevant interpretive framework for the social problems at work in child protection. Instead, irresponsible mothers and their limited agencies are staged front and centre. Categories of limited agency serve as rhetorical devices for the social workers to justify diverse decisions ranging from implementing interventions to terminating the professional-client relationship due to the labelling of the mother as mentally ill. As the rhetorical idiom of unreason does not operate with categories of perpetration and victimization, equivalences for the labels of the practical objectives of victimization are analysed. Consequently, the responsibility of the mother is deflected as her limited agency is seen as a product of troubling conditions. In turn, children are either ignored as victims or even treated as a troubling condition for the mothers’ limited agency. This may lead to the blacking out of the adverse consequences of child abuse and neglect as well as of possible resources for the children to avoid or prevent violent situations. In this way, child protection helps the reproduction of the generational order, which is the basis for child abuse and neglect.

Keywords: Victim-category; constructionism; social problems rhetoric; child protection; mothers; social work

INTRODUCTION

This paper is concerned with the “social problems work” (Holstein & Miller, 2003) of the German child protection system. It is grounded in the constructivist assumption that the management of child abuse and neglect applies different interpretive frameworks in public arenas of social problem activities and on the level of interaction with individual clients (Gubrium & Järvinen, 2014). This perspective argues that claims-making-activities and professional jurisdictions not only are intrinsically linked to the interests of invested groups (e.g., political parties, occupational groups, or social movements), but also may differ significantly for the people who are considered relevant to the management of a given problem.

In order to analyse these interpretive frameworks, sociological analysis has to distance itself from everyday language, which Ibarra and Kitsuse (2003) call “vernacular resources”, instead favouring a more conceptual language that allows for an estrangement of one’s own culture (Hirschauer, 1994). This is also the reason why we do not apply the commonly shared perspective of research on child protection that considers the family as being in need of services. Instead, this paper analyses how social workers of the German child protection system frame their cases rhetorically, and how their rhetoric defines its categorical labels corresponding to positions of gender and generation: to what degree are mothers considered as perpetrators and children as victims? Research usually applies the rhetoric of violence, which is based on a criminological imagery, to child abuse and neglect. It constructs child abuse and neglect as the problem of a perpetrating adult who is acting aggressively towards a child-victim (Best, 1990). Much of the research on child abuse and neglect is carried out within this framework, looking for ways to predict and prevent violent behaviour, or to identify and provide adequate help for the victims and their families (Douglas, 2016; Finkelhor, 2008). The rhetorical idiom of violence, therefore, operates with the terms of risk factors; incidence and prevalence rates; forms of maltreatment (Hellmann, 2014; Witt, Brown, Plener, Brähler, & Fegert, 2017); and concern for the efficiency of legal, professional, and organizational responses (Munro, 2011). At its core, the rhetorical idiom of violence is centred on the aggressive behaviour of a perpetrator who harms the individual child-victim, all of which calls for the prevention of harmful action or the protection of victims. Consequently, the rhetorical idiom of violence has to provide an explanation for what it is exactly that makes the perpetrator act violently or the child become victim. For science, this is part of the standard procedures for testing and elaborating theoretical explanations (Douglas, 2015). Still, theoretical adaptations usually lead to the re-definitions of perpetrator/victim-categories. For example, the discourses of medicalization (Conrad & Schneider, 1992) exchange the categories of “perpetration” and “victimization” with categories of mental health, past traumatization (Widom, Czaja, & DuMont, 2015), or even genetic predispositions (Pezzoli, Antfolk, Hatoum, & Santtila, 2018), which in turn make claims about the agency of perpetrators and victims.

If we turn to other social arenas (e.g., politics, law, professional practices), the interpretive framework often shifts to other imagery. Correspondingly, explanations may be mobilized and adapted according to the interests of engaged groups or institutions (Nelson, 1986; Strauss, 1993): here, the rhetorical idiom of violence might be vulnerable to further claims and ideologies, which tie violent behaviour to categories picked up from various sources of discourse. Law is an instructive example for such re-definitions, as it considers victims of abuse and neglect very differently according to its history. The German civil code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch BGB) recognizes the problem of child abuse and neglect as a problem of “endangering” the best interests of the child:

Where the physical, mental or psychological best interests of the child or its property are endangered and the parents do not wish or are not able to avert the danger, the family court must take the measures necessary to avert the danger. (§ 1666 I BGB)

However, perpetration is defined in terms of parental failure to protect the child, thus positioning the parents as inefficient or unwilling defenders of their children rather than violent aggressors. On the other hand, the victim category is broad and unspecific: it comprises the child’s overall development and considers endangerment in terms of a threat to the child’s bodily, mental, and psychological integrity, as well as its property.

In contrast, the Crime Victims Compensation Act (Opferentschädigungsgesetz OEG), which also regulates the compensation of victims of child abuse and neglect, operates with a very narrow concept based on the idea of physical trauma as it was typical for the war invalids of World War II:

Any person who […] has sustained a personal injury as a result of willful, unlawful physical assault against himself or any other person or as a result of the lawful defense against such an assault, shall be entitled, upon application, to compensation on account of the resulting health damage and economic damage, as provided for by the Federal War Victims Compensation Act, which shall be applied mutatis mutandis […]. (§ 1 I OEG)

For child abuse and neglect, compensation on the basis of the OEG can only be granted if an observable impediment can be traced back to physical injury of the child. This stands in sharp contrast to newer concepts of abuse and neglect – hence the OEG is an instance of what victimization research calls the “neglect of neglect” (Coohey, 2003), referring to institutional (professional and legal) ignorance towards categories of victimization, like neglect, emotional and psychological abuse, bullying, etc.

The provision of explanations and the re-definition of the perpetrator/victim-categories entail a third operation: the re-definition of violent behaviour itself. We know such changes from studies of the “discovery of child abuse” (Pfohl, 1977), the development of child protection institutions (Gordon, 2002; Myers, 2004; Richter, 2011), and from studies on the coming and going of threats to children, such as satanic rituals or abduction by strangers, which were featured prominently in the media stories of the 1980s (Best, 1990). In Germany, a more recent change concerned the banishing of corporal punishment, which in 2000 broadened the range of behaviour considered to be child abuse and did so by conflating corporal punishment with physical maltreatment, which instigated public concerns about an increase in the criminal prosecution of parents (Haug, 2018).

Most importantly, any explanation or re-definition of perpetrator/victim-categories or violent behaviour results in changes of who is included in and excluded from considerations of child abuse and neglect. And, this may be to an extent that does not consider child abuse and neglect as a problem of violence. As we will show in the remainder of this chapter, this is true for the agency that is charged with the prevention and sanction of child abuse and neglect: the child protection services and their professional staff.

CHILD PROTECTION AS SOCIAL PROBLEMS RHETORIC

Child abuse and neglect can be considered a social problem which calls for the action of an official agency (Spector & Kitsuse, 1987). Child protection services and its profession – social work – are expected to possess a framework for their professional “social problems work” (Holstein & Miller, 2003). This entails the practical application of recurrent patterns of interpretation to incidences, thereby constructing them as “workable” cases of social problem categories (Miller & Vitus, 2009). In order to decide who must be considered for the allocation of organizational resources, child protection services have to apply labels to their clients, which “according to some criterion of deservingness or valuation of moral worth” (Hasenfeld, 1999, p. 2) provide the grounds for prevention or intervention vis-a-vis child abuse and neglect. In this way, social problems work ties together “interpretive work” (the application of categories) and “moral work” (the application of moral value) through three practices:

(1) Professionals in human service organizations have to break down troubles by applying condition-categories (Ibarra & Kitsuse, 2003), transforming a messy reality into sets of distinct case properties (Emerson & Messinger, 1977) by which incidences can be sorted into categories of problematic behaviour (Gubrium & Järvinen, 2014).

(2) The transformation of vague troubles into problematic conditions requires the localization of problems by a process of clientization, identifying persons to which services are delivered (Alatsuuri, 2014; Hall, Juhili, Parton, & Pösö, 2003).

(3) The occurrence of social problems – both in general and in the problematic behaviour of individual clients – has to be grounded in vernacular resources, especially rhetorical idioms (Ibarra & Kitsuse, 2003), which provide common sense constructions of moral competence and serve as a rationale for professional and organizational responses:

As moral vocabularies they furnish participants with value-laden themes and narrative formulae capable of endowing claims with memorably expressed significance. Each rhetorical idiom encourages participants to structure their claims along particular lines and not others, hence functioning consequentially for a given claim’s ultimate shape and thrust. (p. 27)

As social constructions, rhetorical idioms are a matter of conventions and may therefore be open for expansion, adaptation, and hybridization. They situate condition-categories in a moral universe with positive and negative positions, thus linking individuals with moral categories. In this sense, rhetorical idioms serve as the base for labelling-processes in child protection (Becker, 1963; Gelles, 1975), which may or may not use status categories of victimization (Holstein & Miller, 1990).

Following these lines of inquiry, we propose to analyse how child protection services in Germany rhetorically frame their cases, and how such an investment in rhetorical idioms acts upon the categories of “perpetration” and “victimization” with regard to gender and generation. We find that child protection workers (1) replace the “rhetorical idiom of endangerment,” which considers child abuse and neglect a problem of violence, with the “rhetorical idiom of unreason” (Ibarra & Kitsuse, 2003), which focuses on the mother as making irrational choices and conducting herself irresponsibly. This shift in rhetoric leads to (2) an approach which favours negotiations between the social wo...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction: Children and Violence – A Blind Spot of Sociology
• PART I PERCEPTIONS AND DEFINITIONS
• PART II INSTITUTIONAL REACTIONS
• PART III CONDITIONS OF CHANGE – GLOBAL, NATIONAL, AND LOCAL
• Index