ABSTRACT
This chapter describes connections between the risk paradigm in child welfare, its ascendancy in other related field and its ties to globalising forces and ideologies. It focuses upon various strategies that have been suggested to empower clients and front line workers in child welfare who operate within a risk paradigm. Empowering strategies concerning risk assessments have emerged from researchers who are challenging modernist notions of the unlimited potential of science. Empowerment is a slippery concept that has appeal for those holding contrary ideological views. However, risk thinking in the risk society changed all of that, creating fundamental paradoxes that Ferguson believes can be exploited. J. Krane and Yuval-Davies also suggest that workers and caregivers could collect 'mothering narratives' and place them in the files along side reports from risk assessment instruments. Those favouring a community approach to child welfare challenge the definition of child abuse and neglect as individual problems amenable to clinical solutions.
