ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the women's accounts of contact with the child protection and criminal justice systems and other state agencies. While the majority of women sought help from informal sources first, and the responses they met with have been described in the last chapter, statutory agencies also became involved in all cases but one. Not all of this ‘help’ or intervention was actively sought by the women. The child herself or others who found out about the abuse also reported to agencies, and where the mother herself made the first contact, she often had little control over who became involved after this. Whether they sought intervention themselves or had it imposed upon them, women approached agencies with specific goals in mind, although often with continuing ambivalence. They did not necessarily abandon either their goals or their ambivalence once the ‘referral’ was made but continued to negotiate with social workers over both aims and responsibilities. The social control role of statutory agencies however added to both their aims (the hope of control being exercised against the abuser) and their fears (the expectation and experience of control exercised against them).
