Overview
- Analyses ideas of ‘expertise’ and ‘experience’ in child protection policy and practice from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century in Britain
- Situates children and parents as agents in changing, challenging, and subverting public and policy perceptions of child abuse and protection
- Traces key shifts in the construction of child protection ‘experts’ and in definitions of child abuse
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood (PSHC)
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About this book
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
This open access book explores how children, parents, and survivors reshaped the politics of child protection in late twentieth-century England. Activism by these groups, often manifested in small voluntary organisations, drew upon and constructed an expertise grounded in experience and emotion that supported, challenged, and subverted medical, social work, legal, and political authority. New forms of experiential and emotional expertise were manifested in politics – through consultation, voting, and lobbying – but also in the reshaping of everyday life, and in new partnerships formed between voluntary spokespeople and media. While becoming subjects of, and agents in, child protection politics over the late twentieth century, children, parents, and survivors also faced barriers to enacting change, and the book traces how long-standing structural hierarchies, particularly around gender andage, mediated and inhibited the realisation of experiential and emotional expertise.
This open access book explores how children, parents, and survivors reshaped the politics of child protection in late twentieth-century England. Activism by these groups, often manifested in small voluntary organisations, drew upon and constructed an expertise grounded in experience and emotion that supported, challenged, and subverted medical, social work, legal, and political authority. New forms of experiential and emotional expertise were manifested in politics – through consultation, voting, and lobbying – but also in the reshaping of everyday life, and in new partnerships formed between voluntary spokespeople and media. While becoming subjects of, and agents in, child protection politics over the late twentieth century, children, parents, and survivors also faced barriers to enacting change, and the book traces how long-standing structural hierarchies, particularly around gender andage, mediated and inhibited the realisation of experiential and emotional expertise.
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Keywords
Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“This is an interesting and suggestive book, useful for historians of activism, childhood, emotion, welfare, media as well as contributing to historical accounts of privacy and confessional culture. Successfully mapping such a large and diverse sector is especially impressive given the eclectic and idiosyncratic nature of the field and ethical issues surrounding archival records on historical abuse.” (Chris Moores, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 56 (2), 2021)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Jennifer Crane is a Public Engagement Research Fellow on the Wellcome Trust-funded project, ‘The Cultural History of the NHS’, at the University of Warwick, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Child Protection in England, 1960–2000
Book Subtitle: Expertise, Experience, and Emotion
Authors: Jennifer Crane
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94718-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-94717-4Published: 11 October 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-06905-6Published: 03 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-94718-1Published: 25 September 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6532
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6540
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 215
Topics: Social History, History of Britain and Ireland, History of Modern Europe, Children, Youth and Family Policy, Childhood, Adolescence and Society