ABSTRACT
If we step back and try to understand, as a total situation, the phenomenon of child maltreatment and child protection work in England in the twenty-first century, then what do we see? Self-evidently, we are confronted with a cultural and political phenomenon and not just a professional, legal, familial, or social-scientific one. In this sense, child abuse and protection are not unique. Other practices addressed to difficult human predicaments, and which were once largely the preserve of specialized professional, legal, and scientific systems, have escaped the boundaries of these same systems and become a focus of intense public, political, and cultural debate and anxiety. Autism and its putative link to the MMR vaccine is one instance. Human embryo research and the ethics of human tissue preservation are another. In all such cases where professional and scientific practices are suddenly propelled into the turbulence of the public sphere, the consequences for practitioners, for the ethics of professional conduct, and for the research methodology itself are surely acute and often irreversible. Following a public crisis of these kinds in the domain of the practice concerned, things are never the same again. Such events are rather like a trauma to a hitherto stable professional system.
