ABSTRACT
As practitioners and managers in social services departments struggle to find a new balance between child protection and family support in the wake of the Department of Health research on child protection (Department of Health 1995) an important issue has been absent from the debates. That issue is the way in which gender affects the current operation of the child protection system. An official summary of Inquiry Reports (Department of Health 1991) concluded that inquiries into child abuse gave too little consideration to structural issues, in particular those relating to race and gender. None the less, the overview of recent Department of Health (1995) research on child protection did not highlight those messages which had emerged from the research programme in both these areas (for example Owen and Farmer 1996).
