Listen to thisOver the past three months, I have picked up on breaking stories here in Scotland and across the UK to critique aspects of the child protection discourse, which dominates approaches to working with children and families here. The stories keep coming. This month its been announced that the UK government are to review the cases of mothers convicted in child death cases, following the release on appeal of another mother jailed for murdering her children. The validity and reliability of the diagnosis of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy is now disputed. A number of parents are seeking legal review of cases where children have been taken into care on the strength of this diagnosis. The whole notion of child protection is on shifting ground. Our belief that science can provide us with answers to complex social questions has been shaken.
I want to move on now to place some of these, case by case, critiques in a wider context. The context I find helpful in explaining some of what's going on is one which draws on themes of modernity and the risk society. In a future column I'll consider alternative ways of thinking about how we approach children and childhood beyond mere protection. I see that Karen VanderVen introduces a post-modern turn in her December 2003 column and readers might want to have a pick up on Karen's take on things. Post-modern ideas offer a number of possibilities for Child and Youth Care workers and I think have a particular resonance in the area of child protection. If this all sounds a bit abstract (and much of post-modernity is), I'll try and explain it, as far as my own limited understanding of this area will take me.
The modern period in human thought is considered to stem from the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Enlightenment thought emerged from a series of advances in the natural sciences. It sought to apply scientific, objective and universal logic and positivist (measurable) criteria as means through which to understand and intervene in the social world. The Enlightenment held out the prospect of all encompassing answers (meta-narratives) to social phenomena. Beliefs and assumptions with their roots in the Enlightenment (especially a faith in science as the route to human progress), have dominated the way we in the west have thought about the world ever since.
Belief in the steady progress of humankind has been asked some serious questions by events such as economic downturn, environmental destruction and the spectre, post 9/11 of international terrorism. Old belief systems and certainties have been shaken and don't seem to be providing the answers to the situations that confront us. To cope with our anxieties we invest in the notion of 'risk', generally equating it with danger. Consider for instance the kind of security arrangements we all face now in airports. In many ways risk has become a collective state of mind rather than an objective reality. We establish all sorts of risk assessment and risk management tools to try and re-establish a tenuous control over our increasingly complex and unpredictable world. We live in a 'risk society.' The Enlightenment project is on shaky ground.
Post-modern thinkers such as the French philosopher Michel Foucault say that we need to understand our world, not in terms of universal and measurable truths but in terms of the historical and cultural constructions of particular beliefs systems and ways of being. Foucault was concerned with the relationship between knowledge and power. He claims that our understanding of mental illness for instance is a result of what he calls the 'psy-complex ' – mental illness has been defined and claimed by the psy-professionals, psychiatrists and psychologists. By describing and defining symptoms, they say what constitutes mental illness. A similar line of thought might be applied to the whole area of child abuse and protection. Those who discover and define abuse and claim an expertise in responding to it – the 'child protection industry' – have become a powerful professional corpus in our society.
Foucault calls the pattern of beliefs and assumptions that determine what we think (and more importantly what we're not allowed to think), discourse. He suggests that we need to ask questions of dominant discourses – to 'problematise' them or 'make the familiar strange' – to challenge taken for granted assumption by asking awkward questions of them, such as 'What if things are not really as they seem? Or, 'How come things are the way we're led to believe they are?' In this way we can begin to understand discourses, not as incontrovertible truths, but as the historical and cultural constructions they are.
Discourses though are powerful normalising forces, pushing us into particular ways of thinking. It can be hard to put your head above the parapet to challenge some of the tenets of the current child protection discourse for instance. You lay yourself open to accusations of not wanting to protect children. Rather than question the discourse itself, what so often happens in organisations and at a wider social level, is that they retrench. They seek answers in better science and greater logic. We have probably all seen the manifestation of that in the proliferation of the procedures manual over the past decade or so. Those forces seeking order and certainty in an uncertain world are in fact a danger to the very human liberties they profess to protect, for the quest for certainty leads to ever more normative and authoritarian responses to what we perceive to be threats to it. This leads to a burgeoning prison population. It leads to diagnoses such as Munchausen's syndrome by proxy to explain complex relational problems. And it brings about moral panics, which add to the forces of social control, when our attempts to impose order are shown to be fallible.
Rather than reinforcing a discourse that isn't working, we need to think outside our current boxes and to consider alternative discourses that might offer different ways of thinking about children and our relationships with them. But before we consider alternative discourses we need to understand some of the processes through which the current one has developed. That will be the task for next month.
