ABSTRACT
The previous chapter focused on the importance of recent child policy as a political and professional framework for transforming adults’ roles and responsibilities towards children’s welfare, education and needs. If we refer more specifically to child-care considerations, there has been a shift towards taking the child’s views into account. Yet the general trend towards networks of adult responsibility and accountability has been largely dominated by the need to protect children. This is largely to do with the way that the 1989 Children Act was foreshadowed by the public, political and academic concern expressed over the sexual abuse of children. The Children Act became the explicit and formal basis for an expanding and complex child protection system which is crucially centred around the problem of abuse. In this chapter I argue that the problem of child sexual abuse has led to a heightened awareness of the boundaries between adults and children. This awareness is reflected in a series of disparate political, legal and professional initiatives and practices which converge on the treatment of children in ontological, moral and political terms. I examine these concerns and the possible implications they have for our understandings of childhood. To begin with, I examine child protection as an organizing principle for the theorizing of abuse and how best to deal with it. There are two themes: the idea of protection and its implications for adult-child relations, and the influence of an associated concept, socialization. I suggest that assumptions built into these two broad concepts underpin policy and professional practice in the field of child abuse. Moreover, through the discussion of protection and socialization I contend that the adult-child boundary has been strengthened.
