Listen to thisPresent day societies seem to have become obsessed with “experts”. Look at any newspaper headline or tune in to any news story on the radio or television and you’re regaled with what some “expert” or another has to say about any subject under the sun. I’ve been suspicious for a while now when I see the label “expert” applied to anything. An “expert” seems to have come to be defined by a lack of deep knowledge of the subject of their professed expertise. Thus “experts' on child rearing are not those who might have been at the hard end of bringing up kids or who have studied human development (or ideally perhaps those who have done both and can reconcile the theory and the practice). No, our present day expert in bringing up children seems to be “super-nanny”, who I see has crossed the “pond” to provide American families the benefit of her “expertise”. No need to bother about the messiness or the social or cultural context of child rearing when all you have to do is to send recalcitrant toddlers to the “naughty step”. In residential child care a recent newspaper feature gave us an “expert's” account of physical restraint. But this “expert” was actually a children's rights advocate, who had probably never been called upon to restrain a child. But hey, since when did you need to do something to be an expert in it. This uncluttered, unsituated form of expertise is what society seems to want.
I had my suspicions about expertise confirmed this month when I got a phone call from the University press office asking if I’d give an expert opinion on a major news story. I assumed that I was going to be asked for my views on the revelation that contrary to the views (and perhaps the wishes) of the world's press, no children had been murdered or tortured on the Haut de la Garenne children's home in the channel island of Jersey. It’s a story I actually do know something about and which I wrote about in a CYC-Online column a few months ago. But no, I was being asked to comment on the “Baby P” case, where a toddler in London was murdered by his mother and her partner. The case was the major news story across the UK for a number of days, prompting the usual ritualistic hand-wringing and demands for social workers to be held to account, including a particularly unsavoury campaign from a particularly unsavoury newspaper for those involved in the case to be sacked. Now, although I am interested in and critical of the way that child protection has emerged as the dominant construct through which society engages with children, I have never actually worked in child protection as such. So I told the press office this and suggested that a colleague, who was engaged in some current research into child protection, might be better placed to do any interview. But she was caught up in something else and the baton was returned to me. So off I toddled to the radio studio to be an “expert” on child protection, much to the annoyance I’ve no doubt of those who would be only too pleased to ask what on earth I know about the subject.
In actual fact I was fortunate enough to be reading
a new book called Reforming Child Protection (Lonne et al,
2008). It’s a brave book, which claims that child protection systems
across the Anglophone world are failing children, families and social
workers. A central argument is that child protection interventions can
cause as many problems for children and families as they profess to
address. One of the points I managed to make in my interview was that
the kind of legal and regulatory demands that social workers
increasingly have to comply with actually get in the way of trusting
engagement with families. And when that central relationship is
compromised through a lack of trust then all the regulatory requirements
of the day aren’t going to protect children. And when following the
procedures doesn’t work social workers are hung out to dry, Lonne et al
argue that child protection needs a new paradigm, one which takes us
beyond the blame games that characterise the current system. But I’m not
sure that everyone wants a new paradigm – there seems to be those who
take some perverse pleasure from revelations of child cruelty. One of
the more critical newspaper commentators castigated what he called “dead
baby porn” in the wake of the coverage of the Baby P case. Likewise,
there seem to be voices among those child advocates (legal and
otherwise) who have descended upon Jersey who appear almost disappointed
by the dismissal of claims of murder and of torture chambers. It seems
that until we see a fairly seismic paradigm shift in attitudes to child
protection more generally then we will lurch from crisis to lurid
crisis, without making a blind bit of difference to the lives of those
we profess to protect. And that’s an expert opinion.
Reference
Lonne, Bob; Parton, Nigel; Thomson, Jane and Harries, Maria. (2008). Reforming Child Protection. London, Routledge.
