ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how child protection procedures and social work practice should alter in order to reflect children's own accounts of the experience of abuse and of the kind of help children and young people find most useful. Children recognise early that life is the art of the possible and value honesty and 'straight talking' in the adults around them. Successive re-negotiations of abuse provide a marker for the historical development of the balance of power between children and adults to act in society and to construct social 'truths' about it. Similar points could be made in relation to the way in which therapeutic or other 'protective' regimes serve the various interests of adult and child participants differentially. The broader socio-historical context within which harms inflicted upon children take place is routinely invoked, to establish some sense of the infinite perfectibility of our understanding of child abuse and our responses to it.