This book differs in several respects from the first edition of Child welfare, England, 1872-1989 (Hendrick, 1994). Chapter One has been expanded to include a third dualism in addition to bodies/minds and victims/threats, namely the normal and the abnormal. The section on ‘Investments’ has also been rewritten in order to draw on the notion of children as ‘the future’ and ‘our future’, images that are particularly evident in contemporary governmental thinking about child welfare. Chapters Two, Three, and Four have been slightly revised and abridged so as to allow for greater attention to be given to the post-1979 period. A completely new Chapter Five, which focuses on the profound socioeconomic changes of the Conservative years from 1979-97 and offers an analytical account of developments in ‘child welfare’ through a select presentation of several important areas affecting children, rather than detailed coverage of all the principal policies. Chapter Six examines New Labour's approach, also through selected themes rather than point-by-point policy analysis. It seeks to explore the meaning of ‘welfare’ both within the government's Third Way philosophy and the wider ‘post-modern’ environment. Broadly speaking, I have tried to identify and discuss significant themes as well as continuities and discontinuities in relation to ‘child welfare’ as a discourse, which is defined here as the ordered and structured way whereby (changing) ideas of ‘child’ and ‘welfare’ are conceptualised and put into practice. My aim, as with the first edition, is to bring children closer to the forefront of historical understanding than has hitherto usually been the case.

I specify ‘historical’ since there are many fine expositions of various aspects of contemporary child welfare policies (for example, Frost and Stein, 1989; Pilcher and Wagg, 1996; Daniel and Ivatts, 1998; Franklin, 2002). The account that follows is not neutral, rather it is guided by a belief in the political significance of the inequitable power relationship existing between children and adults, a relationship that is, in many circumstances, entirely justifiable, but which, nevertheless, can so easily slip into a kind of malevolent despotism at worst, or a soothing (and perhaps ultimately dishonest) paternalism at best. Readers should also be warned that this book stresses what may perhaps be seen as the gloomy side of child welfare since I tend to focus on what I see as the exploitation and/or neglect of children.