Introduction

In the previous chapter, we described the forces that coalesced to support the current dominant modus operandi in child protection and welfare. We argued that models of risk and predictability have converged with the international rise of bureaucratic managerialism and centralised state control of local provision through the regulation and inspection of marketised services. These factors have created the conditions for a moral settlement to take a firm hold. This is characterised by a residual, but strongly legitimised, role for the state in preventing damage to children, which carries high levels of opprobrium for those parents seen as failing to optimise their child's developmental potential. The idea that childhood experiences are important and can be formative clearly has a common-sense truth to it and obviously traumatic experiences in childhood will have lasting impacts. However, a vocabulary has emerged in which notions of toxic parenting and the quest for optimum developmental flourishing create new mandates for the state to act. We argue that these are necessary to explain the sharp rises in national rates of child removal, and particularly permanent removal of very small children documented over the last decade. They also contribute to service fragmentation by privileging intervention in the early years in the form of ‘evidence-based’ parenting programmes.

Rewriting social deprivation in bodies and brains: the great leap backwards