Sanitation

The positioning of social work as a profession that targets the working-class poor in the provision of services and interventions inevitably gives rise to productive tensions in a class society such as Aotearoa. Critical writers have long pointed to the associated ‘sanitation’ of state-sponsored social work:

Arguably, the concept of depoliticisation is a misnomer. Social work that concentrates on addressing deficits in individual and family conduct, rather than targeting structural inequalities, can be said to perform an explicitly political function in terms of reinforcing mainstream liberal orthodoxy.

This orientation is professionally unsettling, particularly given the difficulty of reconciling statutory child protection with national and international social work definitions and practice codes, which aspire to the universal pursuit of human rights and social justice (Cree, 2013: 154– 5). The argument developed here is that effective reform of contemporary child protection must take explicit account of the social and economic location of policy and practice – placing sociological and political understandings firmly backon the table.

Patterns and connections

In Chapter 1, it was proposed that perceptions of child maltreatment and responses to it are best understood within the context of wider society, not a society structured as a fixed totality, but nevertheless a society based on a given set of socio-economic arrangements: liberal capitalism. It is equally important to realise that societal forms are influenced by struggle and contestation – by conflicting class interests.